“Foundation for what—can any one tell me that?” Miss Sophia had been silent an unusually long time, for her. “I’m afraid my sister hasn’t considered that to educate the child above her station in life and out of sympathy with her own people will only lead to her unhappiness in the end. If you would only take my advice, Lucy, before it’s too late, and train the child for a little maid—since you will have her with you—instead of spoiling her as you do…”
“Stella is my little girl, sister,” interrupted the gentle Lucy, with the unexpected daring of some timid animal brought to bay. “She shall share whatever I have, and for as long as I live. Please remember that she hasn’t a blood relation in the world, so far as she knows, and is perfectly free to live anywhere. I intend to give her a good education—just as good as she can take, or as I would have given my own daughter, if I had one—and the rest is in God’s hands—and her own!”
There was a minute’s tense silence. Then Miss Sophia ostentatiously began a conversation on quite another subject with her subdued caller, who wanted nothing so much just then as to catch a glimpse of the unconscious bone of contention, but simply dared not ask in so many words to see Yellow Star.
Lucy sat back in her chair with her thin hands squeezed tightly together, trying hard to recover her composure. It was quite true that Sophia had opposed from the first her purpose to adopt and educate the child, and had yielded ungraciously enough in the end, merely because she had exhausted her weapons. There were but the two sisters left, and the homestead belonged to them equally. Mr. Waring had died the year before, leaving only the few hundred dollars that represented a missionary’s scanty savings. It was entirely natural and right that his widow should come home to live, and quite impossible for her to leave behind the waif whom she had picked up in the Indian camp some eight or nine years earlier, and had taken fully into her heart and home. Her dear husband had loved and believed in the child, just as she did. Yes, Sophia was making it very hard for her, who shrank unspeakably from anything like a contest of wills; yet the purpose with which she had come back to the old home was unshaken.
As Lucy sat there, struggling with painful thoughts and oblivious to the murmur of civil conversation, her quick eye caught a flash of white—evidently a slip of folded paper that some one had slid in the crack of the closed door. She hastily left her chair, and with her sister’s cold gray eye upon her, secured the paper and slipped out of the room with it in her hand, for it was naturally impossible to open it under that fire of suspicious and almost hostile glances. The hall was empty, and she dropped down on a haircloth covered davenport and read:
“Mother Dear: I’ve done everything you said unpackt my things put them away ironed the napkins put on a clean frock for tea and set the table. I just have to go out in the orchard and think awhile. I wanted dreadfully to pick some flowers but Aunt said not to and I’m not going to. If you want me for anything you can find me in Apple-Tree Row next the Fence. I call it my House. Your Little Girl.”
This writing of unnecessary notes was a harmless fancy of Yellow Star’s, that her foster-mother had not had the heart to correct. She had had so few playmates on the reservation—for she wasn’t allowed to play with the camp children, and it had happened that but one of the agency people had a little girl of suitable age and irreproachable propriety—that she had been really obliged to invent most of her own amusements. And then, too, Lucy had told herself that “the child couldn’t have too much practice in English.”
But the “silly trick,” as Miss Sophia called it, had already been a source of some disquiet in the ill-assorted little household of three. Perhaps she had better give the child a hint. And Sophia had contemptuously repudiated the title of “Aunt,” so naturally bestowed on the only sister of the only mother that little Yellow Star had ever known. “None of that nonsense for me,” she had declared. “I haven’t adopted the child!”
“I suppose I’ll have to tell her not to say it any more … and she’ll think it so strange,” mused poor Lucy ruefully enough, foreseeing many trials for her darling, as she gathered up her nice black skirt and made her way as daintily as a cat along the box-bordered walk, past the grape arbor and the tidy kitchen garden into the grassy old apple orchard. She seldom went out-of-doors, except for church, or calling, or shopping, or on some entirely rational errand. It was perhaps the only trait of Stella’s that she vaguely disapproved—this craze to be off and into all sorts of outlandish places. Where under the canopy was she now? There was the last row of trees bending with red and yellow fruit, at the further end of the orchard, and no sign of her.