“Dead!” Polly repeated, a tiny scowl fretting her smooth forehead. “Anything but that, I should call it.”
“Well, not much like what you have been accustomed to. I should die to be shut out from everything, the way you are up here.”
Polly’s cheeks grew red, and a queer little smile came and went.
“I think it is a beautiful thing to help little children to be better and happier; don’t you?”
Marietta gave a short laugh, and lifted her eyebrows. “Oh, of course, if you put it that way. I’d rather be excused—at my age. It is all right enough for those who are on the shelf.”
Polly could not trust an answer. The red on her cheeks deepened, and if Marietta had seen her eyes at that moment she would have discovered an ominous dash.
Marietta, however, was flinging pebbles in the brook and was watching the rings they made.
How long the uninvited guest would have remained at Sunrise Chalet if Sally Robinson had not come over with the announcement that her room was vacant and waiting for her is uncertain. As it was, she went home with Sally, not at all to Polly’s displeasure. She had felt that she could not bear the strain of being constantly on the watch for what Marietta would say next about David. It had been an unpleasant experience from first to last, and she wondered over and over what had been the girl’s object in coming.
Benedicta was plainly glad that the visitor was gone; but in these days she said little about anything, her forbidding silence being remarked upon by everybody, from the White Nurse down to Little Duke.