Nancy of Paradise Cottage

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

THE HEROINE GOES TO MARKET

"Let's see—bacon, eggs, bread, sugar, two cans of corn, and jam. Have I gotten everything, Alma?" Nancy, checking off the items in her marketing list, looked over toward her sister, who had wandered to the door and stood gazing out into the street where a gentle September rain was falling. Alma did not answer, seeming to have gone into a dream, and the grocer waited patiently, his pencil poised over his pad.

"Alma, do wake up! Have I forgotten anything? I'm sure there was something else," said Nancy, frowning, and studying her list, with her under lip thrust forward. "I regularly go and forget something every Saturday night, when there's no Hannah to concoct something out of nothing for Sunday luncheon."

"You said you were going to bake a cake—a chocolate layer cake," suggested Alma, turning, and viewing the proceeding disinterestedly with her hands in her pockets.

"That's it. I have to get flour, and some cooking chocolate, and vanilla. Alma, you've got to help me carry these things. I'm not Goliath."

"Mercy, Nancy, we don't have to take all that home with us, do we? Can't you send them, Mr. Simpson?"

The grocer shrugged apologetically.

"It's Saturday, Miss Prescott, and the last delivery went out at three—all my boys have gone home now or I'd try to accommodate you."

"I do hate to go about looking like an old market woman, with my arms full of brown paper parcels," murmured Alma, sotto voce to her sister.

"Goodness, I don't imagine there'll be a grand stand along the way, with thousands watching us through opera glasses," laughed Nancy. "Would you mind telling me whom you expect to meet who'd faint with genteel horror because we take home our Sunday dinner? I don't intend to starve to spare anybody's feelings."

"Last week I was dragging along a bag of potatoes—and—and I met Frank Barrows. And the bag split while I was talking to him, and those hateful potatoes went bumping around all over the pavement. I never was so mortified in my life," said Alma, sulkily.

Nancy shot a keen glance at her sister's pretty face, and her eyes twinkled. Alma's shortage of the American commodity called humor was a source of continual quiet joy to Nancy, who was the only member of the Prescott family with the full-sized endowment of that gift.

"Dear me, whatever did Frank do? Scream and cover his eyes from the awful sight? Had he never seen a raw potato in all his sheltered young life?"

Alma shrugged her shoulders—a slight gesture with which she and her mother were wont to express their hopeless realization of Nancy's lack of finer feelings.

"I don't suppose you would have minded it. But I hate to look ridiculous, particularly before anyone like Frank Barrows."

"But, Alma, you funny girl, don't you see that you look a thousand times more ridiculous when you act as if a few potatoes bouncing about were something serious? Don't tell me you stood there gazing off haughtily into the blue distance while Frank gathered up your silly old potatoes?...