“Yes, sir,” Sally murmured.
“I reckon any fool could see that Pearl’s mighty near the apple of my eye,” Carson went on, as he dried his hands vigorously on the Sunday-fresh roller towel. “And if she took a notion that maybe some other girl from the orphanage would suit us better, why I don’t know as I could do anything else but take you back. And I’d hate that. You’re a nice, pretty little thing, real handy in the kitchen, but, yes sir, I’d have to tell the matron that you just didn’t suit.... Well, I got to get back to that yearlin’.”
Somehow Sally managed to finish cooking the big Sunday dinner before the family returned from church. Out of deference for the day she decided to change from her faded gingham to her white dress before serving dinner. Surely she had a right to look decent! Clem Carson couldn’t construe her humble “dressing up” as a bid for David’s attention.
In her little garret room she scrubbed her face and hands, pinned the heavy braid of soft black hair about her head, and then reached under her low cot bed for her small bundle of clothes, in which was rolled her only pair of fine-ribbed white lisle stockings. As she drew out the bundle she discovered immediately that other hands than her own had touched it; the stockings had been unrolled and then rerolled clumsily, not at all in her own neat fashion. Then suddenly full comprehension came to her. The pieces of the puzzle settled miraculously into shape. It was here, in this bundle, that David had found the bar-pin. Somehow he had seen Pearl slip into the room that morning, had guessed that her secret visit boded no good for Sally; had spied on her, and then later had retrieved the bar-pin from the bundle in which Pearl had hidden it.
If David had not seen—But she could not go on with the thought. Trembling so that her teeth chattered she dressed herself as decently as her orphanage wardrobe permitted, and then went downstairs to “dish up” the dinner she had prepared.
Immediately after dinner David went across fields to call on his grandfather, a grouchy, sick old man who almost hated the boy because he would soon own the lands which he himself had loved so passionately. He did not return for supper, and at breakfast on Monday there was not time for more than a smile and a cheerful “Good morning,” which Sally, with Clem Carson’s eyes upon her, hardly dared return.
Sally wondered if David had been warned, too, for as the days passed she seldom saw him alone for as much a minute. Perhaps he was being careful for her sake, suspecting Carson’s antagonism, or perhaps, in spite of the shameful trick in which he had caught her, he really cared for Pearl. Evenings he sat for a short time in the living room or on the front porch, Pearl beside him, chattering animatedly; but he was always in his room studying by ten o’clock, a blessed fact which made her own isolation in her little garret room more easy to bear.
On Thursday morning at ten o’clock David appeared at the kitchen door, an axe in his hands.
“Will you turn the grindstone for me while I sharpen this axe blade, Sally?” he asked casually, but his eyes gave her a deep, significant look that made her heart flutter.
Mrs. Carson, standing over her bubbling preserving kettles, grumbled an assent, and Sally flew out of the kitchen to join him.