Rainbow Cottage Read Free

“Oh, that is so good!” she said with a quiver in her voice. “I felt almost as if I was going to faint if I didn’t have some water.”
    “Won’t you sit down out there in the shade and rest awhile before you start back?” said Grandmother a shade hesitantly. It wasn’t exactly what she liked to plan for to have a little tramp-girl sitting under the trellis when Sheila arrived, but—well, one couldn’t be inhuman, and it was a hot morning in the sun.
    “Oh, thank you,” said the girl with that wonderful lighting up of her tired young face that gave a stab of haunting memory to the old lady again. Who was it she looked like? “I’d love to stay a little and just look at those wonderful flowers and that sea. It seemed like heaven here. I never saw such a lovely garden. But I must be getting on. I may have a long way to go yet. I wonder—” And she hesitated and looked shyly at Grandmother. “I suppose it wouldn’t be at all likely that you would know the people living up the other way, would you? I suppose I must have come in the wrong direction, for it seems as if I had walked about ten miles since I left the station.”
    “Why, yes, I know most of the people around this vicinity. I ought to. I’ve lived here around forty years,” said Grandmother briskly, running swiftly over the names of the winter settlers thereabouts. “What was the name of the people you wanted to find? Are they fishing people?”
    The girl looked startled. “Why, no, I don’t think so,” she said thoughtfully. “I really don’t know, but I don’t think there are any men in the family now, at least not at home. It’s a Mrs. Ainslee I’m hunting. Do you happen to know anyone by that name?”
    “Ainslee!” exclaimed Grandmother, looking at the girl with a puzzled frown. “Why, my name is Ainslee! But I don’t know anybody else in this region by that name. What are the initials?”
    “Mrs. Harmon Ainslee,” said the girl with a wondering look at her.
    “Well, that’s my name,” said Grandmother with a grim, almost startled look at the girl. “What was it you—who told you to come to me—? That is, why did you—” Grandmother stopped short in a kind of dismay, not knowing just which question she wanted to ask. This girl didn’t seem like either a beggar or a book agent. Perhaps she wanted to hire out for housework or something. Well, she must get this business over quickly before Sheila arrived.
    “But—I don’t understand!” said the girl wearily, giving a wondering look around that included the garden and the sea and the hummingbird by the lily. “It just couldn’t be a place like this. There must be some mistake.”
    The girl swayed and caught hold of the pillar by the door, and a sudden dazed look in her eyes pulled at Grandmother’s heartstrings.
    “You’d better come in and sit down and rest a bit anyway,” said Grandmother, opening the door and putting out a hand gingerly to the shabby serge sleeve.
    But the girl swayed again and leaned against the pillar.
    “I have a letter here,” she said, fumbling in the worn little leather handbag she carried.
    “A letter?” said Grandmother, half closing the door again. Then she was a beggar or an agent. They always carried letters, dirty, tattered letters that one didn’t want to touch.
    “Yes,” said the girl, bringing out a crisply folded letter.
    “I’m sorry,” said Grandmother almost curtly, “but I really haven’t time to read letters this morning. I’m expecting a guest any minute. If you could just tell me in a word what it is you want—”
    The letter suddenly fell from the girl’s nerveless fingers and fluttered down on the brick pavement.
    “Please excuse me,” she said with a frightened look in her eyes, “but I’ve just got to sit down for a minute, if you don’t mind.” And she suddenly collapsed to the step, her head swaying back to rest unsteadily against the pillar and her long lashes sweeping down across her pale