“Mother,” said Sam gently, “I’ve brought a friend to see you—Annie Laurie Pace.”
“Oh,” sighed a voice from the gloom, struggling between reproachfulness and natural politeness, “have you? How do you do, Annie Laurie?”
“I’m very well, thank, you ma’am. Are you feeling any better?”
“No—no, I don’t seem to get any better. Sam, you’ll have to pull up a shade. Annie Laurie won’t be able to see a thing.”
Annie Laurie closed her eyes for an instant. She dreaded what she would see, and yet she had long wished to know the truth—to know what Sam’s strange home was like. She heard the shade being raised, and with something of an effort she opened her eyes and looked about. What she saw gave her a shock. Her own home was ugly enough, as she knew well; but poverty was here, and worse than poverty—indifference to appearances. The almost bare apartment wore that dejected and unhappy aspect of a room for which no one cares and in which no one hopes. It was a sad room—a sick room—with a long couch and its occupant for the chief objects.
Yes, the couch was long and wide, though the woman who lay on it was so small. Figured brown calico covered the bed, and the woman was dressed in a wrapper of faded blue. There was no collar about her throat—only the coarse open neck-band, showing a shriveled neck. Her face was bloodless and bleached like a vegetable that has grown in the dark, and out of it looked a pair of weary eyes, beneath which were deep, dark circles. Her hair—brown, touched with gray—was brushed back straight and flat from her bulging brow, and this, with her high-arched eyebrows, gave her an almost Chinese look. Her hands, thinner and more apathetic than any hands Annie Laurie ever had seen, lay on the calico cover.
“It’s not very often I have light let in here,” she said. “It makes my head ache so.”
Annie Laurie did not say that she ought not to have let it in for her, if that was the case. She couldn’t really feel that this was the case. She was glad the light was in the room for once, and by it, she moved toward Mrs. Disbrow’s bed, her hand outstretched with something almost like satisfaction, for she knew as she looked in that woman’s face, that if her fortune had been stolen from her by the undertaker, his wife did not know it. She was as convinced of this woman’s innocence when she looked at her, as she was of her pitiful condition. So she took one of the claw-like hands in her own strong grasp and sat down beside her. Mrs. Disbrow’s face was quivering with the excitement of meeting a stranger.
“Sam often talks of you,” said his mother in her fluttering voice. “I’ve been wanting to see you. You’re a strong, fine girl, Annie.”
“Yes, I’m strong and well,” the girl answered. “I’m very thankful.”