“Maybe I could sit here and wait,” said Mrs. Comstock.  “I want to see about getting her a dress for to-morrow.  I am her mother.”

“Then you don’t need wait or worry,” said the girl cheerfully.  “There are two women up in the sewing-room at work on a dress for her right now.  It will be done in time, and it will be a beauty.”

Mrs. Comstock turned and trudged back to the Limberlost.  The bitterness in her soul became a physical actuality, which water would not wash from her lips.  She was too late!  She was not needed.  Another woman was mothering her girl.  Another woman would prepare a beautiful dress such as Elnora had worn the previous night.  The girl’s love and gratitude would go to her.  Mrs. Comstock tried the old process of blaming some one else, but she felt no better.  She nursed her grief as closely as ever in the long days of the girl’s absence.  She brooded over Elnora’s possession of the forbidden violin and her ability to play it until the performance could not have been told from her father’s.  She tried every refuge her mind could conjure, to quiet her heart and remove the fear that the girl never would come home again, but it persisted.  Mrs. Comstock could neither eat nor sleep.  She wandered around the cabin and garden.  She kept far from the pool where Robert Comstock had sunk from sight for she felt that it would entomb her also if Elnora did not come home Wednesday morning.  The mother told herself that she would wait, but the waiting was as bitter as anything she ever had known.

When Elnora awoke Monday another dress was in the hands of a seamstress and was soon fitted.  It had belonged to the Angel, and was a soft white thing that with a little alteration would serve admirably for Commencement and the ball.  All that day Elnora worked, helping prepare the auditorium for the exercises, rehearsing the march and the speech she was to make in behalf of the class.  The following day was even busier.  But her mind was at rest, for the dress was a soft delicate lace easy to change, and the marks of alteration impossible to detect.

The Bird Woman had telephoned to Grand Rapids, explained the situation and asked the Angel if she might use it.  The reply had been to give the girl the contents of the chest.  When the Bird Woman told Elnora, tears filled her eyes.

“I will write at once and thank her,” she said.  “With all her beautiful gowns she does not need them, and I do.  They will serve for me often, and be much finer than anything I could afford.  It is lovely of her to give me the dress and of you to have it altered for me, as I never could.”

The Bird Woman laughed.  “I feel religious to-day,” she said.  “You know the first and greatest rock of my salvation is ‘Do unto others.’  I’m only doing to you what there was no one to do for me when I was a girl very like you.  Anna tells me your mother was here early this morning and that she came to see about getting you a dress.”