“Hiram Strong! If you can show me a way out of this valley of tribulation I'll be the thankfullest woman that you ever seen. It's a bargain. Don't you pay me a cent for this coming week. And I shouldn't have taken it, anyway, when you're throwed out of work so. That's a mighty mean man, that Daniel Dwight.
“You go right ahead and look that farm over. If it looks good, you come back and we'll strike a bargain, I know. And—and—Just to think of getting rid of this house and these boarders!” and Mrs. Atterson finished by wiping her eyes again vigorously.
CHAPTER VII. HOW HIRAM LEFT TOWN
Hiram Strong was up betimes on Monday morning—Sister saw to that. She rapped on his door at four-thirty.
Sometimes Hiram wondered when the girl ever slept. She was still dragging about the kitchen or dining-room when he went to bed, and she was first down in the morning—even earlier than Mrs. Atterson herself.
The boarding house mistress was not intentionally severe with Sister; but the much harassed lady had never learned to make her own work easy, so how should she be expected to be easy on Sister?
Once or twice Hiram had talked with the orphan. Sister had a dreadful fear of returning to the “institution” from which Mrs. Atterson had taken her. And Sister's other fearful remembrance was of an old woman who beat her and drank much gin and water.
Not that she had been ill-treated at the institution; but she had been dressed in an ugly uniform, and the girls had been rough and pulled her “pigtails” like Dan, Junior.
“Once a gentleman came to see me,” Sister confided to Hiram. “He was a lawyer gentleman, the matron told me. He knew my name—but I've forgotten it now.