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Page 58
CHAPTER XI
AFTER DINNER
"Charlotte Chase Ruston, I want you to come over to a little dinner
to-night. Just a few people, and as informal as dinners on hot August
evenings should be. Afterward we'll spend the time on the porch."
"Thank you, Len. Whom are you going to have? I want to prepare my mind
for what is likely to happen."
Mrs. Burns mentioned her guests. "I've arranged them with special
reference to Dr. Leaver," she explained. "I think it will do him good,
just now, to have to exert himself a little bit. He seems well enough,
but absolutely uninterested in things or people,--except the children. He
spends hours with them. I'm going to put you next him, if I may."
"Please don't. I particularly want the chance to talk with Mr. Arthur
Chester about something I've found he can tell me. We never can get time
for it, and this will be just the chance. Give Miss Mathewson to Dr.
Leaver, and put some pretty girl on his other side."
"I will, if you prefer, of course," Ellen agreed promptly. She had
observed that, although she had taken pains to have them meet, Dr. Leaver
and Miss Ruston seemed to be in the habit of quietly avoiding each other.
But she was not the woman to ask her friend's confidence, since it was
not voluntarily given. She could only wonder why two people from the same
world, apparently so well suited to each other, should be so averse to
spending even a few moments together.
An hour later Charlotte, having dispatched considerable business,
bundling it out of the way as if it had suddenly become of no account,
was delving in a trunk for a frock.
"It's the one and only possible thing I have that will do for one of
Len's 'little dinners,'" she was saying to herself. "I know just how
she'll be looking, and I must live up to her. I wonder if I can mend it
to be fit--I wonder."
She carried it downstairs. Madam Chase, sitting by the window with her
knitting, looked up.
"Mending lace, dearie?" she asked. "Can't I do it for you?"
"I'm afraid it's beyond even you, Granny," she said, ruefully. To the
deaf ears her gesture told more than her words.
"Let me see," commanded the old lady. When the gauzy gown was spread
before her she examined it carefully.
"If it need not be washed--" she began.
"It must be. Look at the bottom." Charlotte's expressive hands
demonstrated as she talked. "I've danced in it and sat out dances in all
sorts of places in it. But I can wash it, if you can mend it. I'll wash
it with the tips of my fingers."
"I will try," said her grandmother.
That afternoon Charlotte carefully laundered the mended gown, dried it in
the sun and ironed it, partly with her fingers, partly with a tiny iron.
Finished, it was a work of art, a frock of rare lace of exquisite design,
several times made over, and now, in its last stage, prettier than in its
first.
"If it will hold together," Charlotte said laughing, as she put it on,
and, kneeling before Granny, waited while the delicate old fingers slowly
fastened each eyelet. When she rose she was a figure at which the old
lady who loved her looked with pleased eyes.
"You are beautiful, dearie," she said. "And nobody will guess that your
dress is mended."
"Not a bit, thanks to your clever fingers. Now I'll go find some flowers
to wear, and then I'm off. I'll come back to put you to bed, and you'll
send Bob over if you want the least thing, won't you, even the least?"
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