The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill | Page 6

holding a magazine in her hands, but evidently had not been reading, for her eyes had turned from the girl, who stood only a few feet away from her drying some cups and saucers, to the two others who had just come in, without an instant's delay.
"I am quite all right, dear," she answered the newcomer, "only the kitchen seemed so warm and cozy after the wet day and I was tired."
Betty was too familiar with the lovely, old-fashioned kitchen of her dearest friends even to think about it, but to-night she did look about her for a moment.
The room was the largest in the cottage; the walls were of oak so dark a brown from age that they were almost black; there were heavy rafters across the ceiling and swinging from them bunches of dried, sweet- smelling herbs. The windows had broad sills filled with pots of red geraniums and ground ivy, and as they were wide open the odor of the wet, spring earth outside mingled with the aromatic fragrance of the flowers.
An old stove was set deep into the farthest wall with a Dutch oven at one side and above it a high, severely plain mantel holding a number of venerable pots and pans of pewter and copper and two tall, copper candlesticks. The candles were lighted, as the room was too large for the single light of the lamp on the table near the lounge.
Polly O'Neill had gone straight to her sister and putting both hands on her shoulders had pushed her steadily back inch by inch until she forced her into a large armchair.
"Mollie Mavourneen, you know I hate washing dishes like an owl does the day light, but I am not going to let you do my work and to-night you know the agreeable task of cleaning up belongs to me. I asked you to leave things alone when I went to the door and I don't think you play fair." Polly seized a cup with such vehemence that it slipped from her hand and crashed onto the floor, but neither her mother nor Mollie showed the least sign of surprise and only Betty's eyes widened with understanding.
Strangers always insisted that there were never twin sisters in the world so exactly alike as Mollie and Polly O'Neill (not that their names had ever been intended to rhyme in this absurd fashion, for they had started quite sensibly, as Mary and Pauline), but to the friends who knew them both well this idea was absurd. It was true they were of the same height and their hair and eyes of the same color, their noses and mouths of somewhat the same shape, but with these superficial likenesses the resemblance ended. Anybody should have been able to see that in each detail Polly was the more intense; her hair was blacker and longer, her eyes bluer, her cheek bones a little higher with brighter color and her chin and delicate nose a trifle longer and more pointed. Of the two girls, however, Mollie was the prettier because her features were more regular and her expression more serene; but once under the spell of her sister, one never thought much of her appearance.
Polly had a temperament and she was having an attack of it to-night; the room was fairly electric with it. From some far off Irish ancestor she must have inherited it, for though her father had been an Irishman and had spent forty out of the fifty years of his life in Ireland, he had quite a different disposition and had been as amazed by Polly in her babyhood as the rest of her family.
Captain O'Neill had resigned from the English army eighteen years before and crossed the ocean to spend a few years in the neighborhood of the White Mountains on account of his health; he had no more money than most Irish gentlemen, but had charming manners, was extremely handsome and had soon fallen in love and married a girl twenty years younger than himself. Mary Poindexter had been the girl most loved in Woodford, one of its belles and heiresses, but her money had not amounted to much and soon disappeared after her marriage, until now she had only the cottage in which she and her daughters lived and the income earned by her work as private secretary to Mr. Edward Wharton of "The Wharton Granite Co." Captain O'Neill had lived only until his twin daughters were eight years old and since then the girls and their mother had kept up their small home together.
"You are dead tired and Polly is cross as two sticks and poor Mollie does not know what to do with you. Would you rather I should go away? I only came to tell you something wonderful," Betty