"Perhaps I shouldn't have seen you. It must have been Mr. Thornton's orders, and he knows what is best for me."
She crossed over to the young man and looked rather pitifully up into his face.
"You look like a nice young man," she said; "I like your eyes. You won't say nothing that'll make Mr. Thornton unhappy?"
The reporter took the half-outstretched hand and smiled down into the kindly, wrinkled face. When he spoke there was almost a touch of tenderness in his voice.
"I don't care about making Mr. Thornton unhappy, Miss Doane, but I wouldn't do anything to make you unhappy for the world; and if you ever want anything of the papers, here is my card. Just you send for me and I'll do anything for you that I can."
And so ended Drusilla's first interview.
To her amazement the next Sunday there was spread before her the paper with great headlines: MISS DRUSILLA DOANE, OUR NEWEST MILLIONAIRE. There was the picture of the Doane home for old ladies; there were pictures of the home at Brookvale taken from many angles, pictures of the garden, the conservatories; and in the middle of the page there was Drusilla herself, sitting in the high-backed chair. The article was well written, filled with "heart interest." It told of her early struggles, her years of work, and her later life in the charity home. Evidently the young man had visited the village where she had lived and talked with all who knew her; and Mrs. Smith's hand could plainly be seen in the account of the life of the inmates of the institution over which she had charge. Even poor old Barbara had been called upon to tell about Drusilla, the many little acts of kindness which she had done for the poor and lonely. As Drusilla read it she laughed and said, "Well, I guess Barbara had her teeth in that day." The article ended with the account of the million dollar bequest, and suggested that quite likely the charities of New York would benefit by the newest acquisition to the ranks of its millionaires, as Miss Doane was alone in the world, and had no one on whom to lavish her enormous income or to leave the money when she was called to the other world.
Drusilla did not know it, but this last addition of the facile reporter's pen set many heads of institutions to thinking, and caused many a person to wonder how they could gain the affections or the pity of this old lady, and separate her from at least a part of her new-found inheritance.
Drusilla passed many hours among the flowers in the conservatories, where she won the heart of the gardener by the keen interest she took in his work. He would walk around with her and tell her the names of the plants strange to her, pointing out their beauties and their peculiarities. He soon saw that the orchids and the rare blooms from foreign lands did not appeal to her as did the old-fashioned flowers she knew, and they made a little bargain that in the spring she should have some beds of mignonette, phlox, verbenas, and moss rose. One morning she watched him giving directions to one of the under-gardeners for the potting of small plants for the spring.
"Mr. Donald," she said, "I wish I could plant somethin'. It's been years since I dug around in the earth, and I want to plant somethin' and see it grow."