Molly dropped her fork with a rattle. “Towsley! Has anything happened to him?”
“That’s what I’d like to know. That’s what that poor rich woman, yonder, is grieving herself ill over.”
“Tell us. Tell us, quick, father, please!”
“There’s not so much. She says she found him asleep in her back parlor at nine o’clock. It was snowing fast then, and she kept him all night. That’s what she meant to do, at least. She gave him his supper and had him put to bed on her top floor. She knows he was there till midnight, for she went up to see if he was all right. Then she went to bed herself, and this morning he was gone. The front door was unfastened, and he must have gone out that way. At one moment she blames herself for neglect of him, and the next for having been kind to him.”
Molly sprang up from the table.
“Oh! mother, let me go across and carry the stew and tea. Maybe I could help her to think of something would tell where he was. Anyway, I can tell her just what kind of a boy Towsley is and how well he can take care of himself. He isn’t lost. He mustn’t be. He cannot—shall not be!” cried the girl, excitedly.
“Very well. Put the stew in the china bowl”—the one nice dish that their cupboard possessed—“and take your grandmother’s little stone teapot. If Miss Armacost is a real lady, as I think, she will appreciate the motive of our gift, if not the gift itself. And if she’s not a gentlewoman her opinion would not matter.”
“But she is, mother; she is. I’m so glad I can do something for her! She was nice to me, and ‘giff-gaff makes good friends.’”