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"I'm not afraid," she answered, with a smile, slipping down herself into a chair, beside which, on the floor, stood a sewing-basket from which, Daylight noted, some white fluffy thing of lace and muslin overflowed. Again she smiled. "Though I confess you did startle me for the moment."
"There is no work to-day," cried one, overturning the sewing-basket with the tip of her shoe. "That is the same as saying, to-morrow there is to be no eating," said the eldest, gathering up the sewing implements. Pepe Rey instinctively put his hand into his pocket. He would gladly have given them an alms.
There was old Terrapin, with bonnets and dresses in his wardrobe, and a sewing-basket on his mantel, and with his own huge boots outside the door a pair of tapering gaiters, and in his easy-chair a little being to sing and chatter and mix his punch and make his cigarettes. Ah! how much more entrancing would be Ralph's chamber with Suzette to garnish it!
She fell into silence again, standing by her mother's knee, staring out of the window and watching the clouds move steadily across the sky doing their share of the world's work for all they looked so soft and lazy. Her mother did not break in on this meditative contemplation. She took up her sewing-basket and began busily to sew buttons on a small pair of half-finished night-drawers.
In his wife's sewing-basket in the back room I noticed a batch of unopened letters, and ventured a question which had been in my mind for several days. "Manouvrier, you must get a host of letters these days from people who think you ought to help them because you have got money and they haven't. Do you read them?" "Naw!" He gave me his back, bending suddenly over some real or pretended work.
I felt as relieved and triumphant as an obstetrician after a hard case, and meekly handed over to Dinkie anything his Royal Highness desired, even to his fifth cookie and the entire contents of my sewing-basket, which under ordinary circumstances is strictly taboo. But once the ear-passage was clear the pain went away, and Dinkie, at the end of a couple of hours, was himself again.
In the evenings, he wrote in the little log house by the river, with Auntie Sue sitting in her chair beside the table, the lamp-light on her silvery hair, and her sewing-basket within reach of her hand, engaged with some bit of needlework, a book, or perhaps with one of her famous letters to some other pupil, far away. The stormy days gave him many hours with his pen, and so the book grew.
Would you mind coming down and sitting there while I talk at you and try to work things out? You could go on with your marking." She thought it over a minute. "I'll do it if Father can spare me," she made up her mind. "I'll go and ask him." She went to ask him, and returned in two or three minutes with her small sewing-basket in her hand. "He can spare me," she said.
With trembling hands, the gentle old teacher reached for her handkerchief, which lay in the sewing-basket on the table beside her. Smilingly, she wiped away the tears that filled her eyes. Lovingly, she looked up at him, standing so tall and strong before her, with his reddish hair tumbled and tossed, and his Irish blue eyes lighted with the fire of his inspiration.
Scattered music lay all over the piano, on the music-rack, sliding down on the keys, and in small, untidy piles hastily placed on the red satin cover. Its scattered condition was conclusive evidence that Arethusa had been handling it, for she was the only person on the place who ever scattered anything about so untidily. There was a wicker sewing-basket in the room, Miss Letitia's property.
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