Rainbow Cottage by Grace Livingston Hill Read Free Book Online Page A

miss the prettiest sight of the sea that comes in a day. It’s changing every minute now.”
    So Sheila arose and plunged her hands into the pile of soft pink silk things, each one a wonder in itself to the girl who had never had any of the pretty things that other girls count as common necessities. She presently selected with awe an outfit.
    “They all fit!” she declared breathlessly as Grandmother appeared at the door again just as she was slipping the blue butterfly dress over her head.
    Her hair was dry and rippled around her head like a purple grackle’s plumage. She had combed it out hastily and braided it in two long ropes pinned around her shapely head, and she looked like a sweet little girl as she turned to go downstairs with Grandmother, her feet in blue kid shoes that looked as if they had been chosen just for her.
    “Those are Rosalie’s,” smiled Grandmother, looking at them. “Rosalie is a little hoyden, and her feet are growing rapidly. She cried the night she tried them on and found they were too small.”
    “They are lovely!” said Sheila. “But I’m sorry she couldn’t have had them. It must have been very hard for her to give them up.”
    “She has plenty more,” said Grandmother. “Her father gets her anything she wants. More than she ought to have, I think. And now, come out on the porch and watch the last colors on the sea till the supper bell rings.”
    So Sheila sat on the terrace overlooking the garden, watching the sea over the garden wall as it changed from green and gold and crimson to purple and yellow and silver and then dropped down into mother-of-pearl shot through with all colors. A little quick star twinkled out, forerunner of all the train of heavenly lights, and far on a jutting point of land that darted out into the sea, a lighthouse blazed forth on duty.
    Reluctantly she followed her grandmother at last into a big dining room, big enough to feed all the children and children’s children when they came home and yet cozy with bright lights and flowers and fragrant foods. Festive for her coming, she realized with a strange glad thrill.
    So she took her seat, a grandchild of the house, in a cheery little butterfly dress and, in shy wonder, bowed her head with Grandmother when she repeated the evening grace, a thing that Sheila had never heard before.
    “Lord, we thank Thee for these Thy bounties, and we thank Thee that Thou hast brought at last dear Sheila, the child of my dear lost Andrew, to be one of us here. Amen.”
    Sheila felt her heart thrill that Grandmother should have said that, and when she lifted her head she gave the old lady a sweet, loving smile that, had she only known it, made her look the perfect image of her dear lost mother, Moira.
    Grandmother noticed with relief that her new granddaughter ate her food daintily. Even though she had been a waitress for rough workmen at a railroad junction hotel, she yet had been trained in the niceties of a cultured world. That would make the way ahead much easier than if she had been rough and boorish. Yet Grandmother told herself that even if she had not been trained she would have loved her, for she was so like her lost Andy in many ways.
    They had finished the ice cream and angel food cake and were just getting ready to leave the table when there came a rap on the door, and Sheila, looking up across the living room, saw a young man standing at the front door outlined against the luminousness of the night. Just a dark silhouette, but there was a look of strength and fitness about it that interested her. So many of the men she had met in her isolated home in the West had been rough, unmannerly fellows, men of the ills who had sloughed off the refinements of the world, if they ever had any. The railroad Junction House had not been a place to meet what one would call gentlemen. Tourists and men of culture seldom stopped at the little Junction House where there were few of the comforts of life to be had.
    Even Sheila’s