The girl knelt by the old woman, took one of her withered hands, raised it suddenly to her lips and kissed it.  Aunt Raby’s face was still turned from the light.

“Don’t you keep kneeling on your cashmere,” she said.  “You’ll crease it awfully, and I don’t see my way to another best dress this term.”

“You needn’t, Aunt Raby,” said Priscilla in a steady voice.  “The cashmere is quite neat still.  I can manage well with it.”

Aunt Raby rose slowly and feebly from the sofa.

“You may help me to get into bed if you like,” she said.  “The muggy day has made me wonderfully drowsy, and I’ll be glad to lie down.  It’s only that.  I’ll be as pert as a cricket in the morning.”

The old woman leaned on the girl’s strong, young arm and stumbled a bit as she went up the narrow stairs.

When they entered the tiny bedroom Aunt Raby spoke again: 

“Your dress will do, but I have been fretting about your winter jacket, Prissie.  There’s my best one, though—­ you know, the quilted satin which my mother left me; it’s loose and full, and you shall have it.”

“But you want it to go to church in yourself, Aunt Raby.”

“I don’t often go to church lately, child.  I take a power of comfort lying on the sofa, reading my Bible, and Mr. Hayes doesn’t see anything contrary to Scripture in it, for I asked him.  Yes, you shall have my quilted satin jacket to take back to college with you, Prissie, and then you’ll be set up fine.”

Priscilla bent forward and kissed Aunt Raby.  She made no other response, but that night before she went to sleep she saw distinctly a vision of herself.  Prissie was as little vain as a girl could be, but the vision of her own figure in Aunt Raby’s black satin quilted jacket was not a particularly inspiriting one.  The jacket, full in the skirts, long in the shoulders, wide in the sleeves and enormous round the neck, would scarcely bear comparison with the neat, tight-fitting garments which the other girl graduates of St. Benet’s were wont to patronize.  Prissie felt glad she was not attired in it that unfortunate day when she sat in Mrs. Elliot-Smith’s drawing-room; and yet—­ and yet—­ she knew that the poor, quaint, old-world jacket meant love and self-renunciation.

“Dear Aunt Raby!” whispered the girl.

Tears lay heavily on her eyelashes as she dropped asleep, with one arm thrown protectingly round her little sister Katie.

CHAPTER XXIII

 The fashion of the day

A thick mist lay over everything.  Christmas had come and gone, and Priscilla’s trunk was packed once more—­ Aunt Raby’s old-world jacket between folds of tissue-paper, lying on the top of other homely garments.