“Oh, Peg, Peg! Are we going to take care of all the halt and maimed and blind?”
She looked at him thoughtfully. “Well,—they aren’t all likely to come along our way and anyway I won’t have any more here if you hate it; but you see I always did—and I can’t leave them alone at Mrs. Benderby’s all day and so I—but of course we won’t have any more here if it bothers you—just Wiggles and Spunky. I thought we’d call kitten Spunky. She’s so little and she stands up to Wiggles as if she were his size. I sort of think that kitten’s Irish.”
“Bless you, child, I don’t mind running a foundling asylum. Why should I? I’m one of the foundlings and I’m as grateful to you as Wiggles and Spunky ever can be.”
She looked at him soberly for a moment and then she smiled. There was something extra special about Pegeen’s smile. A hint of it was not always playing about her lips and eyes as the elusive promise of smiles always lurked in Nora Moran’s face. The child’s sensitive mouth and great dark blue eyes were profoundly serious much of the time—quietly happy but serious for all that. When the smiles came, they flashed out suddenly, radiantly, a surprise, an illumination, a wave of gaiety rippling from brow to chin and overflowing the whole child. Even her hair ribbons seemed to quiver with it, her short skirts to swish with mirth, her slim little feet to move to dance tunes.
To see it once was to want more of it.
“Making you happy is sheer, wanton self-indulgence, Peg,” Archibald said as he studied her face. “I’ll not acquire merit by anything I do to set you smiling. That’s sure.”
She did not understand but that made no difference. He often talked over her head, but words were unimportant. The essential thing was that he should be pleased with her and he was. She could see that. Moreover, he wasn’t prejudiced against stray kittens.
“But I won’t show her to you until her eyes are better,” she said wisely. “A smashed leg like Wiggles’ is sort of interesting when it’s all bandaged up, but you’ve got to love a thing considerable much not to mind sore eyes. If I ever get sick and stay sick a long time, I do hope it’ll be a nice, clean, interesting kind of sickness—but what I’d like best would be to be sitting out in the sunshine feeling happy and then just not to be there—like Mr. Benderby. It was hard on Mrs. Benderby, but wasn’t it perfectly lovely for him? Out under the big apple tree he was, and it was all in bloom and there were orioles nesting in it. I think that was wonderful, don’t you? I’d have liked that for Mother—only it was so lovely for me to have a chance to take care of her. I guess that’s why God doesn’t let everybody go in beautiful ways. He knows they’re going to be so happy in a little while that having been sick won’t count and He lets them go the hard way so that the people who love them and are going to have to stay on without them can have the comfort of taking care of them.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” said Archibald.
They were occupying their favorite seat on the doorstep now. Pegeen’s elbows were on her knees, her hands cupping her chin, her eyes gazing out across the Valley.