CHAPTER XII
FROM BEHIND A COUNTER
Mrs. Carew was very angry. To have brought herself to the point where she was willing to take this lame boy into her home, and then to have the lad calmly refuse to come, was unbearable. Mrs. Carew was not in the habit of having her invitations ignored, or her wishes scorned. Furthermore, now that she could not have the boy, she was conscious of an almost frantic terror lest he were, after all, the real Jamie. She knew then that her true reason for wanting him had been—not because she cared for him, not even because she wished to help him and make him happy—but because she hoped, by taking him, that she would ease her own mind, and forever silence that awful eternal questioning on her part: "What if he WERE her own Jamie?"
It certainly had not helped matters any that the boy had divined her state of mind, and had given as the reason for his refusal that she "did not care." To be sure, Mrs. Carew now very proudly told herself that she did not indeed "care," that he was NOT her sister's boy, and that she would "forget all about it."
But she did not forget all about it. However insistently she might disclaim responsibility and relationship, just as insistently responsibility and relationship thrust themselves upon her in the shape of panicky doubts; and however resolutely she turned her thoughts to other matters, just so resolutely visions of a wistful-eyed boy in a poverty-stricken room loomed always before her.
Then, too, there was Pollyanna. Clearly Pollyanna was not herself at all. In a most unPollyanna-like spirit she moped about the house, finding apparently no interest anywhere.
"Oh, no, I'm not sick," she would answer, when remonstrated with, and questioned.
"But what IS the trouble?"
"Why, nothing. It—it's only that I was thinking of Jamie, you know,—how HE hasn't got all these beautiful things—carpets, and pictures, and curtains."
It was the same with her food. Pollyanna was actually losing her appetite; but here again she disclaimed sickness.