“What would she be needin’ all the comfortin’ for?” demanded the cook. “She’d never set eyes on the cousin at all, and her to be gettin’ all that money.”
“She’s kinder sensitive,” said Gracie.
“Sensitive, is it!” said the cook, with significance.
Ross went on eating his dinner. He did not appear to be interested. When he had finished, he bade them all a civil good night, and got up and went out.
“He’s a cold-blooded fish,” said Gracie.
Yet, something seemed to keep him warm—something kept him steadfast and untroubled as he walked, head down, against the storm of wind and sleet, along the lonely roads to the town. He found the barber shop to which Eddy had directed him, and when he entered, the lively little Italian barber did not think his face forbidding.
“I’ve come for the little girl,” said Ross.
“Oh, she’s all right!” cried the barber. “She’s O. K. She eata soom nica dinner—verrie O. K. She sooma kid.”
He was a happy little man, pleased with his thriving business, with his family, with his own easy fluency in the use of the American tongue. He took Ross through the brilliantly lighted white tiled shop—a sanitary barber, he was—into a back room, where were his wife and his own small children.
And among them was the little fair-haired Lily, content and quite at home as she seemed always to be. You might have thought that she knew she had nobody, and no place of her own in this world, and that she had philosophically made up her mind to be happy wherever fate might place her.