Summary
A truant girl, exiled from the classroom for unruly sparks, stumbles upon her seamstress aunt stitching crimson hope into a towering clockwork nurse—an automaton that breathes tinplate promises of wartime charity. Playmates pilfer the mechanical Samaritan; hooves shatter it into scrap-dreams. Undaunted, the child slips into the orphaned Red Cross uniform, boxes herself up, and lands inside a gilt mansion where a fevered heiress hungers for miracles. Masquerading as the bazaar’s living icon, the girl dazzles society matrons until kidnappers—shadows from the mansion’s own raided vaults—drag her into a moonlit labyrinth of bungled burglaries. With street-urchin cunning she turns the thieves’ greed inward, engineering a roundup that leaves handcuffs glittering like misplaced sequins.
Synopsis
Dolly lives with her aunt, who is a seamstress. The child is sent home from school because she has been naughty, and finds her aunt in the act of making a Red Cross costume for a huge mechanical doll. The doll can walk and talk and excites Dolly's interest intensely. Some of her playmates come and run away with the doll, which is later smashed by a runaway horse. Dolly then dresses in the Red Cross costume, hides in the big box, and is taken to the rich woman's home. She reveals her secret to the daughter, a little girl who is sick. The fairy story touches thrown in here are very fine and will appeal to the imagination of small observers. Dolly carries out her deception successfully at the Red Cross bazaar, but later is kidnapped by a gang who have been raiding the house of the wealthy woman. Dolly assists in rounding up the gang.
