“Well, then, if you do love me, mind what I say, and stop crying. It blubbers your face all up, and makes you ugly, and I couldn’t possibly love an ugly little girl.”
Drusilla wiped her eyes by rubbing her fists into them, and then, little woman-like, turned her head aside, and stole a furtive glance at the mirror opposite, to see if she had made herself as ugly as Mr. Alexander said, and finding that she had, she began to compose herself.
And in a few minutes afterwards she seemed deeply interested in sorting the contents of her writing desk.
This was one of the merriest Christmas seasons that the young people of the Lyon family ever passed. The weather was very fine. Everybody was in good health and high spirits. Amusements were many and various. And where-ever the young party went they took little Drusilla with them. She was the family pet.
Bright seasons must terminate, as well as dark ones, and the merry Christmas holidays came to an end, and the happy Christmas party separated.
Again little Drusilla was inconsolable, until time reconciled her to the absence of her friend.
But she obeyed his order, given half in jest and half in earnest. She wrote a little letter to him to be put in every one that his mother sent. And real love-letters they were too, though scratched in the most awkward of infantile hands.
“I love you so; I do love you so much; I do love you more than anybody in the world; every time I say my prayers I thank Our Father for making you, and I pray to Him to bless you and to keep you good. And I do all you tell me to do, and it makes me feel glad. And I don’t do what you tell me not to do. And when anybody wants me to do anything well that is hard, they speak your name and then it seems easy for me. I let mother cut off all my long curls and did not cry, for she said that my hair would grow out so much nicer by the time you come back. But oh, how long it will be before you come back. But I won’t cry after you, for you say it makes me ugly and you couldn’t love an ugly little girl. Mother says I must not wish to be pretty; but oh, I do, because you like pretty people. But if I am good you will always like me, won’t you? Is there any little girl at college that you like as well as me? You’ve got the little dog, I know. You took him with you. To think you could take the little dog and couldn’t take me. It does seem hard, because I love you, oh so much more than the little dog could. I’m not jealous of the poor little dog; don’t think that, only it seems so hard, when I love you so much.”
Such was the sort of ardent nonsense the little child wrote to her big hero; but after all, it was no worse nonsense than many of her grown-up sisters write to the heroes of their imaginations.
Old Mrs. Lyon never looked into little Drusilla’s scrawls—or, if she did, she never took the trouble to decipher them.