In the sunny embrasure of Mrs. White's morning room Trude Romley sorted over the mail that Pepper, the butler, had brought in. So gay and colorful was the room itself with its cretonnes, its soft tinted walls, its singing birds, in wicker cages, that it seemed a part of the fragrant garden that crowded close to the French windows. A tiny fountain splashed azure blue water over delicately sculptured nymphs; a flowering vine trailed around the windows. The mail arranged, Trude sat back in the cushions of a great wicker chair and with a long breath of delight enjoyed the beauty around her. Each day Edgeacres enraptured her anew and roused in her a wonder as to why it should be her lot to be there. "It ought to be Vick or Issy," she would apologize to the nodding flowers or to Mitie, the yellow warbler. And as might be expected Trude had found innumerable ways of making herself useful to Mrs. White as an expression of her gratitude. There were telephone calls she could answer, letters she could write, shopping she could do, ordering, she even conferred with old Pepper and Jonathan, the gardener. She drove with Mrs. White in the afternoon and served tea to the callers who flocked to the house from the nearby summer hotels. "I do not know how I ever got along without you, my dear," Mrs. White had said more than once. "What do you do to make yourself so invaluable? It seems as though just to look at you one leans on you! Even Pepper is saying 'Miss Trude thinks this and Miss Trude thinks that--'" Her benevolent interest in her husband's wards, a certain pride in saying to her friends: "My husband, you know, is looking after the daughters of Joseph Romley, who was a college friend of his," had grown into a real fondness for Trude. "I have never appreciated the dear girl when she's been with us before," she declared to her husband. "I suppose it was because we were in town, then, and I was too busy to get acquainted with her. Why, she's really pretty. And she makes such a slave of herself to her sisters! She hasn't any life of her own. I don't believe they appreciate it, either. It's a shame she doesn't marry some nice young man--" Mrs. White's kind always found virtue's reward in the proverbial "nice young man." Mr. White agreed with her on every point but this. "If she deserted that household it would fall! She's the only one that isn't like her father." "Then she must find someone who'll take the family with her," Mrs. White asserted determinedly. But having no godmother's fairy wand she had not been able, during the summer weeks, to bring the prince to Edgeacres; her husband's acquaintances were too bald and round to play the part of princes.