Betty Gordon in Washington | Page 5

so. Well, I'll lend you a ribbon girdle, and you can turn in the high neck so it will be more in style. You'll see, it will look all right."
While Mrs. Peabody washed her dishes with more energy than usual because she had a definite interest in the coming hours, Betty flew to the shabby room that was titled by courtesy the parlor. She flung up the windows and opened the blinds recklessly. She would take only the plain wooden chair and the two rockers, she decided, for the stuffed plush furniture would look ridiculous masquerading as summer furnishings. The sturdy, square table would fit into her scheme, and also the small rug before the blackened fireplace.
She dashed back to the kitchen and grabbed the broom. She did not dare scrub the porch floor for fear that it would not dry in time, but she swept it carefully and spread down the rug. Then one by one, and making a separate trip each time, she carried out the table and the chairs. With a passing sigh for the bouquet abandoned in the field and probably withered by this time, she managed to get enough flowers from the overgrown neglected garden near the house to fill the really lovely colonial glass vase she had discovered that morning.
"It looks real pretty," pronounced Mrs. Peabody, when she was brought out to see the transformed corner of the porch. "Looks as if we used it regular every afternoon, doesn't it? Do you think it will be all right not to ask him in, Betty?"
"Of course," said Betty stoutly. "Don't dare ask him in! If he wants a drink of water, call me, and I'll get it for him. You must be sitting in your chair reading a magazine when he comes and he'll think you always spend your afternoons like that."
"I'll hurry and get dressed," agreed Mrs. Peabody, giving a last satisfied glance at the porch. "I declare, I never saw your beat, Betty, for making things look pretty."
Betty needed that encouragement, for when it came to making Mrs. Peabody look pretty in the voluminous white skirt and stiff shirtwaist of ten years past, the task seemed positively hopeless. Betty, however, was not one to give in easily, and when she had brushed and pinned her hostess's thin hair as softly as she could arrange it, and had turned in the high collar of her blouse and pinned it with a cameo pin, the one fine thing remaining to Mrs. Peabody from her wedding outfit, adding a soft silk girdle of gray-blue, she knew the improvement was marked. Mrs. Peabody stared at herself in the glass contentedly.
"I didn't know I could look that nice," she said with a candor at once pathetic and naive. "I've been wishing he wouldn't come, but now I kinda hope he will."
Betty gently propelled her to the porch and established her in one of the rocking chairs with a magazine to give her an air of leisure.
"You'll come and talk to him, won't you?" urged Mrs. Peabody anxiously. "It's been so long since I've seen a stranger I won't know what to say."
"Yes, you will," Betty assured her "I'll come out after you've talked a little while. He won't stay long, I imagine, because he will probably have a number of calls to pay."
"Well, I hope Joseph stays out of sight," remarked Joseph Peabody's wife frankly. "Of course, in time the new minister will know him as well as the old one did; but I would like to have him call on me like other parishioners first."
CHAPTER III
BOB HAS GREAT NEWS
The new minister proved to be a gentle old man, evidently retired to a country charge and, in his way, quite as diffident as Mrs. Peabody. He was apparently charmed to be entertained on the porch, and saw nothing wrong with the neglected house and grounds. His near-sighted eyes, beaming with kindness and good-will, apparently took comfort and serenity for granted, and when Betty came out half an hour after his arrival, carrying a little tray of lemonade and cakes, he was deep in a recital of the first charge he had held upon his graduation from the theological seminary forty years before.
"There, that's over!" sighed Mrs. Peabody, quite like the experienced hostess, when the minister's shabby black buggy was well on its way out of the lane. "You're dreadful good, Betty, to help me through with it. He won't come again for another six months--it takes him that long to cover his parish, the farms are so far apart. Let me help you carry back the chairs."
Betty longed to suggest that they leave them out and use the porch as an outdoor sitting room, but she knew that such an idea would be sure to meet with active