III
A little, misery-eyed, wood thrush of a girl in a drab-blue pinafore crept out from her hiding place under a corner desk. She fled across the “office”, up the back stairs and into her “room”, a cot under an alcove, before the Howland person returned from the gate where she had enviously watched the grays drive away.
The little girl had overheard. Parentless, nameless, she had been sold by one person and bought by another,—for a thousand dollars!
The intuitive horror of her nonentity, of that sale and purchase, never left the little girl,—not even twenty years later in womanhood.
She crouched—a tiny mite in blue gingham—on the cot and failed to answer Miss Howland when the latter went through the house, calling for her angrily.