Little Miss By-The-Day by Van Slyke, Lucille, 1880-

"That's the time for you to say, 'Ah, Felicia, you look as though you'd been vairee happy today--in your garden--"

The man strode toward her eagerly. He put his hands on her heaving shoulders and dragged her toward the light.

"Who are you?" he demanded sharply, "tell me quickly, who are you?"

And Felicia looked at him, still dazed, still drifting happily on the flood of her beautiful memories.

"Why, of course I know you--" she whispered gently, "I've been looking everywhere to find you. You're my Portia Person--only the Portia part of you is all quite lost--"

CHAPTER VI

THE LAST PRETENDING

The Portia Person and the young lawyer bent over a long table littered with papers from the young lawyer's portfolio and the storeroom trunks. They were sitting in the young lawyer's room, the room that had been Grandy's and from the mantelpiece the portrait of Grandy's father looked down upon them. His faintly ironical smile seemed to mock their baffled efforts to disentangle the mystery. The tide wind blew in softly from the river; the lights in the quaint old gas fixtures flared waveringly, but the wide room was very still.

In Grandy's "forty winks" leather chair by the fireside sat Felicia, her hair smoothly parted, her tiny figure trig in one of the Sculptor Girl's much mended frocks. She sat primly upright as she always sat, but her sleek head bent itself charmingly--Felicia was knitting. She was weaving a shawl for the Wheezy, a gay red shawl. The warm glow of the wool cast a faint tinge of color upward over her pale cheeks; whenever the Portia Person or the young lawyer asked her a question, as they frequently did, she let her work rest in her lap and answered quietly, her great eyes lifted hopefully.

From the garden they could hear the faint rumble of men's voices, the Architect and the Inventor and the Cartoonist and the Painter Boy and the two new chaps, slender Syrians; (Felicia had found them a few days before starving in a cellar where they were experimenting with reproductions of antique pottery and had brought them and their potter's wheels and their kiln home to live in the glassed-in room. It was there in the autumn following that they perfected those wonderful bronze and turquoise glaze ceramics that delighted the whole art world)--from the nursery above came trailing the high sweet murmur of the Sculptor Girl and the Poetry Girl and the Architect's wife and the Milliner and the folk-dance teacher--in the kitchen Janet MacGregor and Molly O'Reilly wrangled half-heartedly over religious differences but each and every one of these inimitable persons cared not a whit about the thing he or she pretended to be discussing. Each of them wanted to scream,

"What's happening? Why don't you say what you've found out? Why don't you tell us something?"

Eight o'clock, nine o'clock, ten o'clock--Molly O'Reilly couldn't endure the suspense any longer. She cunningly stacked a tray with nut- bread sandwiches and a pitcher of milk and strode bravely up the stairs to Grandy's room.

"Miss Day, darlint," she called through the half opened door, "I've the matter of a nibble of food here--"

Felicia did not put down the knitting, she merely lifted her head.