When the attic was once more restored to its orderliness she closed the window and went down-stairs to wrestle with her curls. They were tangled, but ordinarily she would have been able to braid them into some semblance of neatness, but the trying experience of the past moments, the joy of gaining an adopted mother, set her fingers bungling.
"Ach, I can't, I just can't make two braids!" she said at length, ready to burst into tears.
Then she remembered David. "Mebbe he's on the porch yet. I'll go see once."
With the narrow brown ribbons streaming from her hand and a hair-brush tucked under one arm she ran down the stairs. She found David, for once a gloomy figure, on the back porch, just where she had left him.
"David," she said softly, "will you help me?"
"Why"—his face brightened as he looked at her—"you ain't"—he started to say "crying"—"you ain't mad at me for getting you into trouble with Aunt Maria?"
"Ach, no. And I ain't never going to be mad at you now for I just adopted your mom for my mom—mother. She's going to be my Mother Bab; she said so."
"What?"
He knitted his forehead in a puzzled frown. Phœbe explained how kind his mother had been, how she understood what little girls like to do, how she had promised to be Mother Bab.
"You don't care, Davie, you ain't jealous?" she ended anxiously.