Such a look of rapture came into the child's face when it was finally made clear to her that she was to have the picture to keep that no one noticed the omission of spoken thanks. She was too embarrassed to say anything, but she took it as if it were something sacred.
"I suppose because Lloyd happens to be the goddess just now to whom she burns incense," said Miss Katherine when she had gone. "These little schoolgirl affairs are very amusing sometimes. They're so intense while they last."
Maggie could not have told why she did not show the picture of the Princess to her father. In an undefined sort of way she felt that he would look at it as he would look at the picture of any little girl, and that he would not understand that she was so much finer and better and more beautiful and different in every way from all the other girls in the world. But Corono would understand. For two days Magnolia had looked forward to the pleasure of showing it to her.
"Can't you get old Dixie out of a walk, daddy?" she exclaimed at last. "I'm mighty anxious to get home before sundown. I want to stop at Roney's with this library book, and show her the picture, too."
Aroused from his reverie the old farmer clucked to his horse, and they went bumping down the stony pike at a gait which satisfied even Maggie's impatient desire for speed.
"I reckon Roney will be mighty glad to see you," he remarked, as he stopped the horse in front of an old cabin a short distance from his own home. "She's been worse this week. You'll have half an hour yet before sundown," he added, as he turned the wheel for her to climb out of the carryall.
"I'll stay till supper-time," she called back over her shoulder, "for I have so much to tell her this week."
With the library book tucked away under the old gray shawl, she ran down the straggling path to the little whitewashed cabin.
Roney would understand. Roney had always understood things from the time they had first been neighbours on a lonely farm near Loretta. That was when Magnolia was a baby, and Corono, six years older, without a playmate and without a toy, had daily borrowed her and played with her as if she had been a great doll. It was Corono who had discovered her first tooth, and who had coaxed her to take her first step, and had taught her nearly everything she knew, from threading a needle and tying a knot, to spelling out the words on the tombstones in the nuns' graveyard. Corono could often tell what she was thinking about, even before she said a word. She was the only one at home to whom Magnolia ever mentioned the Princess.
Several years before the two families had moved away together from the old place. In that time Corono's mother had died, and her father had become so crippled with rheumatism that he could no longer manage to do the heavy work on the farm he had rented. They were glad to accept their old neighbour's offer of an empty cabin on his place. After that, when Corono was not at the farmhouse helping Mrs. Budine with her cleaning or sewing or pickle-making, Magnolia was at the cabin, following at the little housekeeper's very heels, as she went about her daily tasks. But now for several months Corono had been barely able to drag from one room to another. Whether it was a fall she had had in the early summer which injured her back, or whether it was some disease of the spine past his skill to discover, the doctor from the crossroads could not decide.