Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp | Page 2

work on which she was engaged. Although the bell stopped quivering when Betty closed the door, the girl did not look up from her work.
Sharp-eyed Betty saw that the stranger was knitting, and she seemed to be engaged upon another over-blouse like that in the window, save that the silk in her lap was of a pretty dark blue shade. Betty saw her full, red lips move placidly. The girl was counting over her work and she actually was so deeply immersed in the knitting that she had not heard the bell or realized that a possible customer had entered.
"Ahem!" coughed Betty.
"And that's twenty-four, and--cross--and two--and four----" The girl was counting aloud.
"Why," murmured Betty Gordon, her eyes dancing, "she's like Libbie Littell when she is somnambulating--I guess that is the right word. Anyway, when Libbie walks in her sleep she talks just like that----
"Ahem!"
This time Betty almost shouted the announcement of her presence in the shop and finally startled the other girl out of her abstraction. The latter looked up, winked her eyes very fast, and began to roll up her work in a clean towel. Betty noticed that her eyes were very blue and were shaded by dark lashes.
"I beg your pardon," said the shopgirl. "Have you been waiting long?" She came forward quickly and with an air of assurance. Her look was not a happy one, however, and Betty wondered at her sadness. "What can I show you?" asked the shopgirl.
She was not much older than Betty herself, but she was more self-possessed and seemed much more experienced than even Betty, much as the latter had traveled and varied as her adventures had been during the previous year and a half. But now the stranger's questions brought Betty to a renewed comprehension of what she had actually entered the shop for.
"I'm just crazy about that blouse in the window--the orange one," she cried. "I know you must have made it yourself, for you are knitting another, I see, and that is going to be pretty, too. But I want this orange one--if it doesn't cost too much."
"The price is twelve dollars. I hope it is not too much," said the shopgirl timidly. "I sold one for all of that before I left Liverpool."
Betty was as much interested now in the other girl as she was in the orange silk over-blouse.
"Why!" she exclaimed, "you are English, aren't you? And you and your family can't long have been over here."
"I have been here only two months," said the girl quietly.
There was a certain dignity in her manner that impressed Betty. She had very dark, smoothly arranged hair and a beautiful complexion. She was plump and strongly made, and she walked gracefully. Betty had noted that fact when she came forward from the back of the shop.
"But you didn't come over from England all alone?" asked the curious young customer, neglecting the blouse for her interest in the girl who spread out its gossamer body for approval.
"It took only seven days from Liverpool to New York," said the other girl, looking at Betty steadily, still with that lack of animation in her face. "I might have come alone; but it was better for me to travel with somebody, owing to the emigration laws of your country. I traveled as nursemaid to a family of Americans. But I separated from them in New York and came here."
"Oh!" Betty exclaimed, not meaning to be impertinent. "You had friends here in Georgetown?"
"I thought I had a relative in Washington. I had heard so. I failed to find her so--so I found this shop, kept by a woman who came from my county, and she gave me a chance to wait shop," said the English girl wearily.
"Mrs. Staples lets me knit these blouses to help out, for she cannot pay large wages. The trade isn't much, you see. This one, I am sure, will look lovely on you. I hope the price is not too much?"
"Not a bit, if it will fit me and I have that much money in my purse," replied Betty, who for a girl of her age had a good deal of money to spend quite as she pleased.
She opened her bag hastily and took out her purse. The purse was made of cut steel beads and, as Betty often said, "everything stuck to it!" Something clung to it now as she drew it forth, but neither Betty nor the shopgirl saw the dangling twist of tissue paper.
"And I'll buy that other one you are knitting," Betty hurried to say as she shook the purse and dug into it for the silver as well as the bills she had left after her morning's shopping. "I know that pretty blue will just look dear on a friend of mine."
She was busy with