“Tell me what you’re doing to Azalea,” squealed Hi defiantly. “Azalea’s all right, ma’am. I don’t want anything done to her.”
“Well, she wasn’t invited here any more than you,” snapped Miss Adnah, dropping him on the brick walk. “You run home and leave us to conduct our own affairs. Hear?”
“Oh, aunt!” Annie Laurie whispered agonizingly, “Azalea will hear you.”
“Why didn’t you stay in the kitchen, miss? You seemed very anxious not to leave it a few minutes ago. I won’t have boys looking in my windows.”
“But it’s only Hi. He’s crazy about Azalea—like her little brother, you know. Azalea will think we’re dreadful.”
“Dreadful? We may be a terror to evil doers—well, hear that telephone, will you? Ringing like mad. Never did I know such a morning. No, I’ll answer it, Ann. Hello! Hello! Yes. The Pace residence. Who? Carin Carson. Very well, what is it? Yes, Ann is home. All right? Of course she’s all right. Why shouldn’t she be? You want to speak to her? She’s busy just now.”
“Oh, oh, don’t speak like that, aunt,” implored Annie Laurie. “Not in that tone of voice. Let me have the telephone, Aunt Adnah, please—please. I was bad, honestly, aunt—not at all the way I ought to have been. Carin’s sorry, I reckon.”
But Miss Adnah had hung up the receiver, and she turned toward Annie Laurie with a stormy look in her eye.
“I reckon I did you an injustice, Ann. It must have been something pretty bad they did to you. You can back down as much as you please, but for my part I mean to teach them that if they think they can fool with the Paces, they are making a mistake.”
“But my child,” the clear tones of Miss Zillah could be heard saying from the drawing room meantime, “why didn’t you like Annie Laurie? She seems the nicest sort of a girl to me. I’ve taken care of her—I and my sister, that is—since she was a little one, and she’s all that a daughter should be to us. Of course I realize that we may not have succeeded in taking her mother’s place to her. That was hardly to have been expected. But we have done the best we could for her, and when we saw her coming on in school so splendidly, and realized that she was likely to do something fine, we were very proud indeed. I can’t tell you how grateful we were to Mrs. Carson for giving her a chance for special instruction, and for being in with girls like you and Miss Carin. But we saw from the first that something was going wrong. The child seemed too excited to eat. Once or twice I’ve heard her cry out in the night—she sleeps next me, and after she’s asleep I open the door between our rooms so as to hear if anything goes wrong.”