“Oh! you do, do you? You are a very observing young person—at the wrong times.”
Molly opened her big gray eyes to their widest.
The little old lady was as odd as she looked, after all. Then she reflected that when people spoke in that tone of voice they were usually suffering in some manner. It was the very sound Father Johns’ speech had, whenever he came home from an especially hard day’s toil and his rheumatism bothered him. She again slipped her strong arm about Miss Lucy’s waist and remarked, anxiously:
“I do believe I did hurt you badly! Please lean on me and I’ll help you home in a jiffy. Then some of your ‘girls’ will take care of you.”
By “girls” Molly meant servants, of which there were at least three in the big corner house.
“Very well. The sooner we bring this episode to an end the better pleased I shall be,” answered the other. In reality, she had been more touched than she herself quite understood by the frank commiseration in Molly’s eyes, and she could not remember when anybody had clasped her body so affectionately. The sensation it gave her was an odd one; else a person so eminently correct and punctilious as Miss Armacost would never have walked the whole length of the finest block on the Avenue, and in full sight of her aristocratic neighbors’ windows, within the embrace of a girl from Side Street.
“But, my child, you should be more careful. You might have broken my bones.”
“Yes’m, I might; might-be’s aren’t half so bad as did-do’s,” returned Molly airily, and again Miss Lucy flashed a penetrating glance into the merry, freckled face.
But there was no disrespect manifest upon it, and the lady remarked: