“Did you bring the card that tells all about me—and my mother?” Sally brushed the compliment aside and demanded in an eager whisper.
“No, dearie, I was afraid Mrs. Stone might want it to make an entry about Mr. Carson’s taking you for the summer, but I copied the data. You go ahead with your packing while I tell you what I found out,” Miss Pond answered nervously, but her pale gray eyes were sparkling with pleasure in her mild little escapade.
Sally unlocked her own particular locker with the key that always hung on a string about her neck, but almost immediately she whirled upon Miss Pond, her eyes imploring. “It won’t take me a minute to pack, Miss Pond. Please go right on and tell me!”
“Well, Sally, I’m afraid there isn’t much to tell.” Miss Pond smoothed a folded bit of paper apologetically. “The record says you were brought here May 9, 1912, just twelve years ago, by a woman who said you were her daughter. She gave your birthday as June 2, 1908, and her name as Mrs. Nora Ford, a widow, aged 28—”
“Oh, she’s young!” Sally breathed ecstatically. Then her face clouded, as her nimble brain did a quick sum in mental arithmetic. “But she’d be forty now, wouldn’t she? Forty seems awfully old—”
“Forty is comparatively young, Sally!” Miss Pond, who was looking regretfully back upon forty herself, said rather tartly. “But let me hurry on. She gave poverty and illness as her reasons for asking the state to take care of you. She said your father was dead.”
“Oh, poor mother!” A shadow flitted across Sally’s delicate face; quick tears for the dead father and the ill, poverty-stricken mother filmed her blue eyes.
“The state accepted you provisionally, and shortly afterward sent an investigator to check up on her story,” Miss Pond went on. “The investigator found that the woman, Mrs. Ford, had left the city—it was Stanton, thirty miles from here—and that no one knew where she had gone. From that day to this we have had no word from the woman who brought you here. She was a mystery in Stanton, and has remained a mystery until now. I’m sorry, Sally, that I can’t tell you more.”
“Oh!” Sally’s sharp cry was charged with such pain and disappointment that Miss Pond took one of the little clenched fists between her own thin hands, not noticing that the slip of paper fluttered to the floor. “She didn’t write to know how I was, didn’t care whether I lived or died! I wish I hadn’t asked! I thought maybe there was somebody, someone who loved me—”
“Remember she was sick and poor, Sally. Maybe she went to a hospital suddenly and—and died. But there was no report in any papers of the state of her death,” Miss Pond added conscientiously. “You mustn’t grieve, Sally. You’re nearly grown up. You’ll be leaving us when you’re eighteen, unless you want to stay on as an assistant matron or as a teacher—”