“I wouldn’t play with you anyway,” said Anne; “I have an errand to do, and if I had not I would rather never play than play with such a hateful, ill-speaking child as you are,” and Anne hurried on her way toward the Starkweathers’ low-built, weather-beaten house near the shore.
“I shall be glad indeed to get rid of some of my scarlet yarn,” declared Mrs. Starkweather, “and you can take home a skein or two of it and tell Mistress Stoddard that her little girl does an errand very prettily. I could wish my boys were as well-mannered.”
Anne smiled, well pleased at the pleasant words.
“Uncle Enos says there is no better boy than Jimmie,” she responded. “He says he is a smart and honest lad,—a ‘real Starkweather,’ he calls him,” she responded.
“Does he so?” and the woman’s thin face flushed with pleasure at this praise of her eldest son. “Well, we do prize Jimmie, and ’Tis good news to know him well thought of, and you are a kindly little maid to speak such pleasant words. Mistress Stoddard is lucky indeed to have you.”
“I call her Aunt Martha now,” said Anne, feeling that Mrs. Starkweather was nearly as kind as Mrs. Stoddard, and quite forgetting the trouble of Brownie’s loss or of Amanda’s teasing in the good woman’s pleasantness.
“That is well,” replied Mrs. Starkweather. “You will bring her much happiness, I can well see. I could wish you had come to me, child, when your father went; but the Stoddards can do better for you.”
“Should I have called you ‘Aunt’?” Anne asked a little wistfully.
“Indeed you should, and you may now if Mistress Stoddard be willing. Say to her that I’d like well to be Aunt Starkweather to her little maid.”
So Anne, with her bundle of scarlet yarn, started toward home, much happier than when she had rapped at Mrs. Starkweather’s door.