As he went out of the bare, spotless sitting-room into the bare, spotless hall, the children of the 'Home' filed past, two by two, for their afternoon walk. There were twenty-six sober-faced girls in blue cotton frocks and broad-brimmed straw hats.
"They take exercise regularly, sir," said the superintendent. "We're careful with them in all ways. They're well-fed, kept neat, taught good manners, and have all pains taken with their education and training. We do our best for them and try to get them good homes."
"I am sure of that." Good heavens!—how he would hate his child to be one of the twenty-six! Poor little Anne! Mr. Patterson caught himself up impatiently. He was no more responsible for her than for any, or all, of the others. If his wife had lived—but he—a widower, whose job kept him thousands of miles away from home most of the time,—it was unreasonable to expect him to keep an orphan girl whom his family had picked up. Ugh! How he'd hate to trot along in that blue-frocked line! "I'm a dawdling idiot," he said irritatedly to himself. "What am I worrying about? I've done the sensible thing, the only possible thing. Her own people deserted her. I've secured her a decent home and honest training. Whew! It's later than I thought. I'll have to rush to make that four-ten train."
An hour later, having given hurried explanations to Anne and started her off in a cab, he was on a north-bound train.
And Anne?
The bewildered child gathered only one fact from his speech. She was not going to Miss Drayton, as she had expected—dear Miss Drayton, to whom she longed to pour forth her secret. Instead, she was going to strangers—people, Mr. Patterson said, who took care of little girls that had no fathers and mothers.
She hugged Honey-Sweet tight in her arms and walked up the steps of the square brown house.
If you have never seen the 'Home for Girls,' you will wish me to describe Anne's new abode. Let me see. I have said that the house was square and brown, haven't I? with many green-shuttered windows. The grounds were large and well-kept—almost too spick and span, for one expects twenty-six children to leave behind them such marks of good times as paper dolls and picture-books, croquet-mallets and tennis balls on trampled turf.
The brick walk led straight between rows of neatly-clipped box to the front door. In the grass plot on the right, there was a circle of scarlet geraniums and on the left there was a circle of scarlet verbenas. On one side of the porch, there was a neatly-trimmed rose-bush with straggling yellow blossoms, and on the other side there was a white rose-bush.
The front door was open. Anne saw a long, narrow hall with whitewashed walls and a bare, clean floor. A curtain which screened the back of the hall fluttered in the breeze, and disclosed a long rack holding twenty-six pairs of overshoes, and above them, each on its own hook, twenty-six straw hats. Anne counted them while she waited and her heart sank—why, she could not have told. She knew that no matter how long she might live, she would never, never, never want a broad-brimmed straw hat with a blue ribbon round it. A subdued clatter of knives and forks came from a room at the back. Anne reflected that this place seemed more like a boarding-school than a home. How odd it was to have a sign over the door saying that it was a 'Home'! And 'for Girls.' How did the people choose that their children were to be just girls?