“I must go, it is my time to be on duty,” she said, smoothing her apron and settling her cap importantly, “I will come back when I can.”

Lucia looked envious.  “Do not be long,” she called after her.

She settled back with a sigh, and the little goat came over to have her neck patted.  Lucia stroked it lovingly.

“Garibaldi,” she said aloud, “we are in a dream, you and I, and soon we will both wake up and find ourselves back in the white cottage with Nana scolding because we are late for supper.  And we’ll be sorry too, won’t we?  For that will mean that the beautiful sheets and the soft pillow will vanish the way they do in the fairy tales, and this lovely garden will go too.”

“But what if there were another one to take its place?” a voice inquired from the doorway.

CHAPTER XIV

THE FAIRY GODFATHER

Lucia turned and looked up quickly.  She was startled and not a little embarrassed at having her confidence overheard.

Through the door that led from the ward the American was pushing a bed on wheels.  Lucia had seen that same bed many times before.  It had belonged to the old Mother Superior of the convent, and many a bright morning she had seen it out in the garden as she sat at her desk in the schoolroom above.

She looked at the white pillow half expecting to see the old wrinkled face of Mother Cecelia, but instead Captain Riccardi looked up at her and smiled.

“See, I’ve found you at last,” he said, as Lathrop pushed the bed beside Lucia’s chair.  “I was beginning to think that you were just a dream child, and that I had imagined about the milk.”

Lucia laughed gayly.

“No, Captain, that was not a dream, or I hope it wasn’t, for if the milk was not real then I dreamed about the pennies, and the sick soldiers never got them.”

“Sick soldiers!  Did you give away the money?”

“Oh yes, sir, how could I keep it?  I did not know you were a Captain, I thought—­”

“You thought I was just a poor soldier, eh?”

“Well, yes, if you will excuse me for saying so, I did, but anyway I would not have kept the money.”

“Why not?”

“How can you ask?  Why because, to accept pay for something—­and such a little thing as a pail of milk—­”

“Two pails.”

“No, just one, they were only half-full, but no matter.  I wanted to give away the milk, not sell it, and so I put the pennies in the box at church.”

“And all the time I thought you were perhaps buying pretty ribbons with it.”

Captain Riccardi shook his head.  “But I might have known better.”

“Ribbons!” Lucia scorned the idea.  “What do I need with such foolishness, with a war going on just under my nose!  I had other things to think about, I can tell you, and other ways to spend my pennies.”