“Is there?” asked Betty, brushing it away with the back of her hand.  “I didn’t know it.  Maybe it’s because I am so glad.  It seems as if I was going back to my own family; to somebody who really belongs to you more than just fourth cousins, you know.  A godmother must be the next best thing to a real mother, you see, Davy, because it’s a mother that God gives you to take the place of your own, when she is gone.  Oh, let’s hurry home and tell Cousin Hetty.”

Slipping from the window-sill to the floor, she carried the book she had been reading back to its corner in the little red bookcase, and shut it up with the musty volumes inside.  Then she walked slowly down the narrow aisle of the little meeting-house, between its double rows of narrow straight-backed pews.  As she reached the bench-like altar, extending in front of the pulpit, she slipped to her knees a moment.  Her sunbonnet had fallen back from her tousled curls, and the late afternoon sun streamed across her shining little face.

“Thank you, God,” came in a happy whisper from the depths of a glad little heart.  “It’s the nicest surprise you ever sent me, and I’m so much obliged.”

Then Betty stood up and put on her sunbonnet.  The next moment she had scrambled over the sill, pulled the window down after her, and walked down the slanting board to the ground.  Catching Davy by the hand, and swinging it back and forth as they ran, she went skipping across the road regardless of the dust.  Down the lane they went, between the rows of cherry-trees; across the orchard and up the path.  Somehow the world had never before seemed half so beautiful to Betty as it did now.  The May skies had never been quite so blue, or the afternoon sunshine so heavenly golden.  She sang as she went, swinging Davy’s warm little hand in hers.  It was only one of Mother Goose’s old melodies, but she sang it as a bird sings, for sheer gladness: 

     “Gay go up and gay go down,
      To ring the bells of London town.”

CHAPTER III.

“ONE FLEW EAST.”

The New York letter reached the hotel while Eugenia was out in the park with her maid, and the bell-boy brought it to her on a salver with several others, as she was stepping into the elevator to go up to her room.

“Here, take my gloves, Eliot!” she exclaimed, tossing them to the maid, and beginning to tear open the envelopes as soon as her hands were free.  Eliot, a plain, middle-aged woman, with a patient face and slow gait, picked up the gloves, and followed her young mistress down the corridor.

Eugenia dashed into her sitting-room, throwing herself into a big armchair, regardless of the fact that she was crushing the roses in her pretty new hat as she leaned her head against the high back.  Three of the letters which she opened so eagerly were from the girls who had been her best friends at boarding-school.  She had been away from Riverdale Seminary only a week, but already she was homesick to go back.  The school was a very select one, and the rules were rigid, but Eugenia had known no other home for three years.