“Let me go with Bobbins, sir,” whispered the girl of the Red Mill. “I’ll know what to say to Mr. and Mrs. Caslon.”
“I guess you will, Ruth. That’s right. You bring the twins up here to see their sister.” Then he turned and smiled down at Sadie, and there were tears behind his eyeglasses. “If I have my way, young lady, your coming here to Sunrise Farm will be the best thing—for you and the twins—that ever happened in your young lives!”
CHAPTER XVIII—SUNDRY PLANS
Perhaps Sadie Raby would have been just as well pleased had Mr. Steele allowed her to go to the Caslons’ to see her brothers, instead of having them brought up the hill to Sunrise Farm. The gentleman, however, did not do this because he disliked Caslon; Sadie had saved Bennie from what might have been certain death, and the wealthy Mr. Steele was quite as grateful as he was obstinate.
He was determined to show his gratitude to the friendless girl in a practical manner. And the object of his gratitude would include her two little brothers, as well. Oh, yes! Mr. Steele proposed to make Sadie Raby glad that she had saved Bennie from the runaway horse.
The other girls and boys, beside the members of the Steele family, were anxious now to show their approval of Sadie’s brave deed. The wanderer was quite bewildered at first by all the attention she received.
She was such a different looking girl, too, as has been already pointed out, from the miserable little creature who had been found by Mr. Steele in the shrubbery, that it was not hard to develop an interest in Sadie Raby.
Encircled by the family and their young visitors on the veranda, Sadie again related the particulars of her life and experience—and it was a particularly sympathetic audience that listened to her. Mr. Steele drew out a new detail that had escaped Ruth, even, in her confidences with the strange child.
Although the “terrible twins” were unable to remember either father or mother—orphan asylums are not calculated to encourage such remembrances in infant minds—Sadie, as she had once said to Ruth, could clearly remember both her parents.
And although they had died in distant Harburg, where the children had been put into the orphanage, Sadie remembered that the family had removed to that city, soon after the twins were born, from no less a place than Darrowtown!