“Perhaps it would be better not,” Azalea said, as if having thought the matter over, she reached the same conclusion. “Come to the fire, then. You will soon dry.”
She turned away to give the girl a chance to make herself comfortable in her own manner, and lighted the alcohol stove beneath the shining brass teakettle. She and Carin kept a little store of supplies at school—dainties designed to help out their light luncheons—and now she made a selection from these, and spreading a tray daintily, put it before Paralee. There was the steaming tea, crackers, cookies, cheese, and candied ginger.
“Such a queer little meal,” she laughed apologetically, “but it will help to get the damp out of you. You must feel quite like a sponge, Paralee.”
The girl looked up from under her heavy brows.
“What is a sponge?” she demanded.
Carin heard Azalea stammeringly trying to make clear to her pupil the nature of a sponge, and discreetly withdrew to the most distant part of the schoolroom and began busying herself by making a sketch of the storm-tossed trees in the wild purple light. She heard Azalea’s voice going on and on, kindly, gently, insistently; heard Paralee’s gruff answers; but the rain and the wind drowned the words. It was only when Azalea called to her that she learned of the nature of the conversation. Paralee was standing with half dried garments before the fire. She had eaten her little repast, and with her one poor hand was brushing back the hair that straggled about her face.
“Paralee,” said Azalea, “wants to be a teacher, Carin. She has to make her own living, and that is the way she means to do it.”
Not a gleam of Azalea’s eye, not the barest flicker of the voice, told that she thought such an ambition outrageous. The heavy-faced, half-clothed child, so dark and hateful, so ugly and suspicious, might have been the embodiment of light for all that Azalea’s manner betrayed. Once more Carin’s affectionate appreciation of her friend went out in swift response.
“Does she?” asked Carin in the same friendly tone. “Well, we’ll teach her what we know, and then she can go to some one better fitted to make a teacher of her.”
They could see the girl peering up furtively from under her hair, wondering if it could be possible that they believed in her. No one ever had. But obstinately, passionately, in the face of all things, she believed in herself.