"There are. Did you ever see the inside of one of them?"
"Why, n-no; though I—I have given money to them." This time Mrs.
Carew's voice was almost apologetically pleading in tone.
Sadie Dean smiled curiously.
"Yes, I know. There are lots of good women that have given money to them—and have never seen the inside of one of them. Please don't understand that I'm sayin' anythin' against the homes. I'm not. They're good things. They're almost the only thing that's doing anything to help; but they're only a drop in the bucket to what is really needed. I tried one once; but there was an air about it—somehow I felt— But there, what's the use? Probably they aren't all like that one, and maybe the fault was with me. If I should try to tell you, you wouldn't understand. You'd have to live in it—and you haven't even seen the inside of one. But I can't help wonderin' sometimes why so many of those good women never seem to put the real HEART and INTEREST into the preventin' that they do into the rescuin'. But there! I didn't mean to talk such a lot. But—you asked me."
"Yes, I asked you," said Mrs. Carew in a half-stifled voice, as she turned away.
Not only from Sadie Dean, however, was Mrs. Carew learning things never learned before, but from Jamie, also.
Jamie was there a great deal. Pollyanna liked to have him there, and he liked to be there. At first, to be sure, he had hesitated; but very soon he had quieted his doubts and yielded to his longings by telling himself (and Pollyanna) that, after all, visiting was not "staying for keeps."
Mrs. Carew often found the boy and Pollyanna contentedly settled on the library window-seat, with the empty wheel chair close by. Sometimes they were poring over a book. (She heard Jamie tell Pollyanna one day that he didn't think he'd mind so very much being lame if he had so many books as Mrs. Carew, and that he guessed he'd be so happy he'd fly clean away if he had both books and legs.) Sometimes the boy was telling stories, and Pollyanna was listening, wide-eyed and absorbed.
Mrs. Carew wondered at Pollyanna's interest—until one day she herself stopped and listened. After that she wondered no longer—but she listened a good deal longer. Crude and incorrect as was much of the boy's language, it was always wonderfully vivid and picturesque, so that Mrs. Carew found herself, hand in hand with Pollyanna, trailing down the Golden Ages at the beck of a glowing-eyed boy.
Dimly Mrs. Carew was beginning to realize, too, something of what it must mean, to be in spirit and ambition the center of brave deeds and wonderful adventures, while in reality one was only a crippled boy in a wheel chair. But what Mrs. Carew did not realize was the part this crippled boy was beginning to play in her own life. She did not realize how much a matter of course his presence was becoming, nor how interested she now was in finding something new "for Jamie to see." Neither did she realize how day by day he was coming to seem to her more and more the lost Jamie, her dead sister's child.