Doodles told, and his mother listened; but before he had finished, Granny O’Donnell called her away.
She was gone a long time. Blue was with her when she came back, and both were strangely grave. After tea Mrs. Stickney tried to unlock the trunk, but did not succeed, and Doodles went to bed without seeing his violin.
CHAPTER XII
THE HEART OF THE FLATIRON
It was Mrs. Jimmy George that found the road to the heart of The Flatiron.
“Gracious me! what if ’t was my Jim—and my baby!” she wailed, twisting her little hard-worked hands over Blue’s story of the dancer and her passionately-expressed longing to lie “side o’ Jim and the baby.” “Why,” mourned she, her blue eyes tearful, “I’d ’a’ carried her some o’ my strawb’ry jell, if I’d only known! Gracious me, ther’ ’s sights o’ things we’d do, but we don’t have no chance! I’m awful sorry! You say she’d saved up to pay her fun’ral expenses? Wouldn’t ther’ be ’nough to take her out home?”
Blue shook a prompt negative. “Mother says ther’ ain’t, and Giles Gaylord says ther’ ain’t. Wish ther’ was!”
Mrs. Jimmy George picked up her whimpering Evangeline, while her forehead puckered into two little hard lines above her nose.
“Say,” she burst out excitedly, “it’s a roarin’ shame to let that poor thing be buried in th’ town lot, ’way off f’m her own folks! Gracious, what if ’t was me! Say, you just tell Gaylord not to make no ’rangements till I see him!”
Blue stared. Had Mis’ George suddenly gone crazy? “Maybe he’s started,” he said slowly. “He was goin’—”