“Are you going to adopt her?” Helen asked.
“And send her to Briarwood?” put in Jennie.
“That might be the very best thing that could happen to her,” Ruth rejoined soberly. “She has lived at times in a theatrical boarding house and has likewise traveled with her father when he was with a more or less prosperous company.
“These experiences have made her, after a fashion, grown-up in her ways and words. But in most things she is just as ignorant as she can be. Her future is not the most important thing just now. It is her present.”
Helen heard the last word from the other room where she was dressing, and she cried:
“That’s it, Ruthie. Give her a present and tell her to run away from her aunt. She’s a spiteful old thing!”
“You do not mean that!” exclaimed her chum. “You are only lazy and hate responsibility of any kind. We must do something practical for Bella Pike.”
“How easily she says ‘we’,” Helen scoffed.
“I mean it. I could not sleep to-night if I knew this child was in her aunt’s control.”
A knock on the door interrupted the discussion. Ruth, who was quite dressed now, responded. A lout of a boy, who evidently worked about the stables, stood grinning at the door.