Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories | Page 9

a stealthy way.
Mrs. Frary was right. The Kirbys presently passed with only a cursory
glance at the swathed occupants of the motor-car. They were laughing
like a lot of children as they scrambled through the hedge. John--a big,
broad John, as strong and brisk as a boy--carried a tiny barefoot girl on
his shoulder. Margaret, her beauty more startling than ever under the
sweep of a gypsy hat; her splendid figure a little broader, but still
magnificent under the cotton gown; her arms full of flowers and ferns,
was escorted by two more children, sturdy little boys, who doubled and
redoubled on their tracks like puppies. The tiny barefoot girl, in her
father's arms, was only a tangle of blue gingham and drifting strands of
silky hair; but the boys were splendidly alert little lads, and their high
voices loitered in the air after the radiant, chattering little caravan had
quite disappeared.
"Well!" said Mrs. Dunning, then.
"Poor, dear Margaret Kirby!" was on Mrs. Frary's lips; but she didn't
say it.
She and Mrs. Dunning stared at each other a long minute, utterly at a
loss. Then they reopened their books.

BRIDGING THE YEARS
The rain had stopped; and after long days of downpour, there seemed at
last to be a definite change. Anne Warriner, standing at one of the
dining-room windows, with the tiny Virginia in her arms, could find a
decided brightening in the western sky. Roofs--the roofs that made a
steep sky-line above the hills of old San Francisco--glinted in the light.
The glimpse of the bay that had not yet been lost between the walls of
fast-encroaching new buildings, was no longer dull, and beaten level by

the rain, but showed cold, and ruffled, and steely-blue; there was even a
whitecap or two dancing on the crests out toward Alcatraz. A rising
wind made the ivy twinkle cheerfully against the old-fashioned brick
wall that bounded the Warriners' backyard.
"I believe the storm is really over!" Anne said, thankfully, half aloud,
"to-morrow will be fair!"
"Out to-morrow?" said Diego, hopefully. He was wedged in between
his mother and the window-sill, and studying earth and sky as
absorbedly as she.
"Out to-morrow, sweetheart," his mother promised. And she wondered
if it was too late to take the babies out to-day.
But it was nearly four o'clock now; even the briefest airing was out of
the question. By the time the baby was dressed, coated, and hooded,
and little Diego buttoned into gaiters and reefer, and Anne herself had
changed her house gown for street wear, and pinned on her hat and veil,
and Helma, summoned from her ironing, had bumped Virginia's coach
down the back porch steps, and around the wet garden path to the front
door,--by the time all this was accomplished, the short winter daylight
would be almost gone, she knew, and the crowded hour that began with
the children's baths, and that ended their little day with
bread-and-milky kisses to Daddy when he came in, and prayers, and
cribs, would have arrived.
Anne sighed. She would have been glad to get out into the cool winter
afternoon, herself, after a long, quiet day in the warm house. It was just
the day and hour for a brisk walk, with one's hands plunged deep in the
pockets of a heavy coat, and one's hat tied snugly against the wind.
Twenty minutes of such walking, she thought longingly, would have
shaken her out of the little indefinable mood of depression that had
been hanging over her all day. She could have climbed the steep street
on which the cottage faced, and caught the freshening ocean breeze full
in her face at the corner; she could have looked down on the busy little
thoroughfares of the Chinese quarter just below, and the swarming
streets of the Italian colony beyond, and beyond that again to the bay,
dotted now with the brown sails of returning fishing smacks, and
crossed and recrossed by the white wakes of ferry-boats. For the
Warriners' cottage clung to the hill just above the busy, picturesque
foreign colonies, and the cheerful unceasing traffic of the piers. It was

in a hopelessly unfashionable part of the city now; its old, dignified
neighbors--French and Spanish houses of plaster and brick, with deep
gardens where willow and pepper trees, and fuchsias, and great clumps
of calla lilies had once flourished-- were all gone, replaced by modern
apartment houses. But it had been one of the city's show places fifty
years before, when its separate parts had been brought whole "around
the Horn" from some much older city, and when homesick pioneer
wives and mothers had climbed the board-walk that led to its gate, just
to see, and perhaps to cry over, the painted china door-knobs, the
colored glass