Janice Day, Young Homemaker | Page 5

work in the morning.
When Janice had come up to bed the previous evening she had brought with her the "treasure-box" which daddy usually kept in the wall safe in the living room. It contained certain heirlooms and trinkets that had been her mother's, and were now Janice's most sacred possessions.
She had had to beg daddy for the treasure-box, for he, too, prized its contents beyond words. But Janice was a careful girl, and daddy trusted her, and he knew, too, that the mementoes of her dead mother seemed to bring the woman closer to the little daughter; and so, in the end, he had allowed Janice to carry the treasure-box to her room to be kept for the night, but to be returned to its usual place after the girl had had it by her and looked at its contents for a while.
There were a few pieces of jewelry--more valuable for their associations than for their intrinsic worth, the gold framed photographs of Grandfather and Grandmother Avion, which clasped like a little book, and the miniature of Janice's mother painted on ivory when she was a girl by a painter who had since become very famous.
This last was the girl's dearest possession--the memento of her mother which she cared for above everything else. Daddy had put it into her keeping with a reverence that could not fail to impress Janice Day, young as she was. Broxton Day had worshipped his wife for her higher qualities as well as having loved her for her human attributes.
Something of this attitude toward his dead wife Janice, young as she was, understood. She knew, for instance, that there was no other woman in the world as a mate for Broxton Day now that her mother was gone. All the more must she try, therefore, to fill her mother's place in his life.
She had taken the miniature out of the treasure-box and was looking with dimming eyes at it by the window when, shifting her glance, she had seen Arlo Weeks, Junior, crossing the street. This was her mother when she was a girl! What a sweet, demure face it was. Janice did not realize that much of the expression of the countenance in this miniature was visualized in the flesh in her own face.
No wonder daddy had fallen in love with such a pretty, pretty girl! So thought Janice Day. And--
What was Arlo Junior, the mischievous torment of the neighborhood, doing with those cats? This sudden query shattered her dream completely. She returned the miniature to the treasure-box, and closed and latched the cover.
"Goodness knows," murmured Janice Day, "there are cats enough around this house without Arlo Junior bringing any more upon the premises. Sometimes I hear them squalling and fighting when I wake up in the night."
With the treasure-box in her hand, she opened her bedroom door and crossed the hall to the storeroom. The window of this room was over the back porch. She heard a step on the porch flooring. The door of the summer kitchen was seldom locked. Was Arlo Junior down there?
That boy was constantly getting into trouble with the neighbors. There was a regular feud between Olga Cedarstrom and Arlo Junior. Olga had chased him half a block only the other day, threatening him with a broom.
And the cats! Here they came from all directions--over the back yard fences and from the barn. Fat cats, lean cats, shabby "ash-barrel" cats, and pet cats with ribbons and collars. Amazedly, Janice Day owned to herself that she had never seen so many cats gathered in a more or less harmonious group before.
Instead of fighting or "mauling," they approached the back porch of the Day house as though on pleasure bent. Was that Arlo Junior giggling down there?
She put down the treasure-box and tried to open the window. But the sash stuck. She distinctly heard the door below close and footsteps receding from the porch.
Wishing to make sure that it was Arlo Junior who had been below, the girl ran back to her bedroom. Yes! there he was scuttling across the street in evident haste to get under cover.
"Now, isn't that odd?" murmured Janice. Suddenly a sound floated up from below--an echoing wail that seemed wrenched from the very soul of a tortured cat. The cry reverberated through the house in a most eerie fashion.
Fortunately her father slept in the front of the house and there was a closed door between the front and the back halls on both floors. But Janice heard Olga's big, flat feet land upon the floor almost instantly. That feline wail had evidently brought the Swedish girl out of her dreams, all standing.
That sound sent Janice out of the room on a run. She must reach the seat of trouble before Olga got to the place!