"You pine for pink ice-cream; don't you?" smiled Miss Tripp; "but one might tire of even the pinkest ice-cream, if it appeared too often. What one really wants is--plain bread." She cast a barely perceptible glance at Elizabeth, the laces at her throat quivering with the ghost of a sigh. The next instant she was laughing at Richard whose curly head was beginning to droop heavily over his food.
"Poor little fellow," she murmured. "Do look, Elizabeth, he's almost gone!"
"Won't you carry him up-stairs for me, Sam?" Elizabeth begged her husband. "I ought not to have kept him up for dinner.--You'll excuse us just an instant; won't you?"
It was a pretty picture; the tall, stalwart father lifting the child rosy with sleep, and the little mother hovering anxiously near, like a small brown bird. Mr. Hickey observed it solemnly; Miss Tripp smilingly; then, for some reason unknown to both, their eyes met.
"--Er--let me pass you the--bread, Miss Tripp," said Mr. Hickey, short-sightedly choosing among the viands immediately within his reach.
"Thank you, Mr. Hickey," said Evelyn, and again that faint, elusive sigh shook the delicate laces at her throat.
As Miss Tripp was putting the finishing touches to a careful toilet the next morning she caught the sound of a whispered dispute in the hall; then small knuckles were cautiously applied to the panel of her chamber door.
"Aunty Evelyn! Aunty Evelyn! are you waked up?"
Miss Tripp had been brooding since daylight over the accumulated problems which appeared to crowd her narrow horizon like so many menacing thunder-caps; but she summoned a faint smile to her lips as she opened the door.
"Why, good-morning, dears!" she cried cheerfully at sight of the two small figures in their gay dressing-gowns and scarlet slippers.
"We want to hear a story, Aunty Evelyn," announced Doris, prancing boldly in, each individual curl on her small head bobbing like coiled wire. "We like stories."
"Come here, pet, and let Aunty brush your curls."
"No; I don't want my curls brushed; I want to hear a story about a be-utiful princess going to seek her fortune."
Miss Tripp suppressed a vague sigh. "I know a poor, forlorn princess who is obliged to go out all alone into the cold world to seek her fortune," she said. "And I'm very much afraid she won't find it."