“Then you would not call her a promising child,” suggested the doctor.
“No—that is—the child is a care; she is not tractable. We have one hundred children here,” and the matron threw out her hands in a most telling gesture.
“One hundred children!” murmured the doctor, and turned from her, for something hurt his throat.
The next moment Maddie, who had wanted to “hear her own feet walking,” was with them. A slip of a child, perhaps seven years old, with a frightened, anxious little face, that broke into dimpling smiles when the doctor lifted her to his knee with a “Well, Maddie, I have come to take you home with me, to the Christmas jollification, you know.”
Maddie did not know, but she was willing to take him on trust. She held fast to his finger, and leaned her bright head against him, while he put on her shabby little coat that did not fit, and the shabbier little hat. The matron looked at him, half smiling, and then at Maddie with perplexity.
“It is just a little helpless child after all,” she thought. Then, taking the bonny face between her hands, she stooped and kissed her. “Be a good girl, dear,—I hope you will be happy.”
It was here that Maddie made her explanatory apology. “I will be. I couldn’t be happy here, you see—’cause—I wasn’t used to bein’ a ’sylum orphum—I was born the other kind of a orphum—they’re different and always has a granny—and a lap—and——”
“Yes, I know, dear,” replied the matron, looking very red and teary, and ready to laugh all at once, while the doctor shook hands in a haven’t-a-moment-to-spare sort of a way, and hurried the small prattler away.
They found Jeanie waiting at the store with everything ready for the trying on. Jeanie, who seemed to know all about little girls—and doctors. Then followed a most exciting time. Maddie hardly knew just what happened, but dusk found her with the doctor and Jeanie, homeward bound. No one would ever have suspected, to see her then, that she knew aught of “’sylums.”
“Tell me, Maddie,” said the doctor, “what were you doing on the fire escape at midnight?”