His Julie! His little girl! Ah! she was no child to choose her lover lightly and if she loved him, trusted him to make her future, all would be well. He thought of her as he had left her, sweet and dainty in spite of the little dabs of sugar and frosting that stuck to the quaint blue apron which nearly covered her from head to foot. He remembered her embarrassment when Grémond’s name came up and kept that picture of her long before his eyes as if to accustom himself to this new aspect. He remembered too how flushed her cheeks were over the work and the tired shadows under her eyes told him plainly enough the relentless demand she was making upon her strength. Gad! those girls had been working eighteen hours at a stretch! Eighteen hours! It wasn’t the first time, either! And he, who would give his life to make things easier, was powerless—to another man would be given the right! Good heavens! Did Grémond realize his privilege? As if suddenly weary the Doctor flung himself down in his chair and heaved a sigh. Presently his lids drooped heavily. When he opened his eyes the room was flooded with sunlight.
The order for the wedding-cake which had been a cause of such tribulation to the girls had come through Mrs. Lennox for a young cousin of her husband’s in whose marriage she was much interested. The order consisted of a bride’s cake, a round wedding-cake, two hundred boxes and in addition some thirty dozen small assorted cakes to be served with the supper. The bride’s mother had given the girls a fruit-cake recipe which had been many years in her family and had asked them to make the cake at least a month before the wedding that it might “age,” as the saying is. Hours easily counting into days had gone into the preparation of the fruit alone for this large order before the work of putting the cake together began; and then to make the twenty loaves, each of which when done resembled in size a two-quart brick of ice-cream, it was necessary to mix and cook the dough in installments. But as Julie told Dr. Ware, that was as child’s play to the intricacies of the frosting and the catastrophe that ensued; and the nervous as well as the physical strain of that, coming on top of all the rest of the work which the order entailed, told severely on the girls, especially Julie, though she was up with Hester at six the next morning packing the boxes into the wooden case which was to take the cake to its destination.