“I like it—this,” she confided shyly. “You see, I—I hain’t had it before. Even the dream-lady didn’t do—this.”
“The dream-lady?”
Margaret hesitated. Her grave eyes were on her mother’s face.
“I suppose she was—you,” she said then slowly. “I saw her nights, mostly; but she never stayed, and when I tried to catch her, she—she was just air—and wasn’t there at all. And I did want her so bad!”
“Of course you did, sweetheart,” choked Mrs. Kendall, tremulously. “And didn’t she ever stay? When was it you saw her—first?”
Margaret frowned.
“I—don’t—seem—to know,” she answered. She was thinking of what Dr. Spencer had told her, and of what she herself remembered of those four years of her life. “You see first I was lost, and Bobby McGinnis found me. Anyhow, Dr. Spencer says he did, but I don’t seem to remember. Things was all mixed up. There didn’t seem to be anybody that wanted me, but there wouldn’t anybody let me go. And they made me sew all the time on things that was big and homely, and then another man took me and made me paste up bags. Say, did you ever paste bags?”
“No, dear.” Mrs. Kendall shivered.
“Well, you don’t want to,” volunteered Margaret; and to her thin little face came the look that her mother had already seen on it once or twice that afternoon—the look of a child who knows what it means to fight for life itself in the slums of a great city. “They ain’t a mite nice—bags ain’t; and the paste sticks horrid, and smells.”
“Margaret, dearest!—how could you bear it?” shuddered Mrs. Kendall, her eyes brimming with tears.