“Why did you go away without permission?”
“Because I had business to do which could not be transacted in this room.”
“That doesn’t answer my question. Why did you not ask permission?”
The girl slowly raised her two hands, and showed her shapely wrists close together, and a bit of the forearm not covered by the sleeve of her black dress.
“Because,” she said slowly, “the shackles have fallen from these wrists.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” said Sabina, apparently impressed in spite of herself, but the younger daughter clapped her hands rapturously.
“Splendid, splendid, Dorothy,” she cried. “I don’t know what you mean either, but you look like Maxine Elliott in that play where she--”
“Will you keep quiet!” interrupted the elder sister over her shoulder.
“I mean that I intend to sew here no longer,” proclaimed Dorothy.
“Oh, Miss Amhurst, Miss Amhurst,” bemoaned the matron. “You will heartlessly leave us in this crisis when we are helpless; when there is not a sewing woman to be had in the place for love or money. Every one is working night and day to be ready for the ball on the fourteenth, and you--you whom we have nurtured--”
“I suppose she gets more money,” sneered the elder daughter bitterly.
“Oh, Dorothy,” said Katherine, coming a step forward and clasping her hands, “do you mean to say I must attend the ball in a calico dress after all? But I’m going, nevertheless, if I dance in a morning wrapper.”
“Katherine,” chided her mother, “don’t talk like that.”
“Of course, where more money is in the question, kindness does not count,” snapped the elder daughter.
Dorothy Amhurst smiled when Sabina mentioned the word kindness.
“With me, of course, it’s entirely a question of money,” she admitted.
“Dorothy, I never thought it of you,” said Katherine, with an exaggerated sigh. “I wish it were a fancy dress ball, then I’d borrow my brother Jack’s uniform, and go in that.”
“Katherine, I’m shocked at you,” complained the mother.
“I don’t care: I’d make a stunning little naval cadet. But, Dorothy, you must be starved to death; you’ve never touched your lunch.”
“You seem to have forgotten everything to-day,” said Sabina severely. “Duty and everything else.”
“And did you elope with the captain of the ‘Consternation,’ and were you married secretly, and was it before a justice of the peace? Do tell us all about it.”