“So am I. Therefore, let us condole with one another. You first.”
“I’ve lost Aunt Betty’s hundred dollars!”
Her friend fairly gasped, and held her from him to search her troubled face.
“Whe-ew! That is serious. Yet lost articles are sometimes found. Out with the whole story, ‘body and bones’—as my man Owen would say.”
Already relieved by the chance of telling her worries, Dorothy related the incidents of the night, and she met the sympathy she expected. But it was like the nature-loving Mr. Winters that he was more disturbed by the loss of the great chestnut tree than by that of the money. Also, the story of the stranger she had found wandering by the lily-pond moved him deeply. All suffering or afflicted creatures were precious in the sight of this noble old man and he commented now with pity on the distress of the friends from whom the unknown one had strayed.
“How grieved they’ll be! For it must have been from some private household she came, or escaped. There is no public asylum or retreat within many miles of our mountain, so far as I know. I wonder if we ought to advertise her in the local newspaper? Or, do you think it would be kinder to wait and let her people hunt her up? Tell me, Dolly, dear. The opinion of a child often goes straight to the point.”
“Oh! Don’t advertise, please, Mr. Seth! Think. If she belonged to you or me we wouldn’t want it put in the paper that—about—you know, the lost one being not quite right, someway. If anybody’s loved her well enough to keep her out of an asylum they’ve loved her well enough to come and find her, quiet like, without anybody but kind hearted people having to know. If they don’t love her—well, she’s all right for now. Dinah’s put her to bed and told me, just before I came away, that it was only the exposure which had made her ill. She had roused all right, after a nap, and had taken a real hearty breakfast. She’s about as big as I am and Dinah’s going to put some of my clothes on her while her own are done up. Everybody in the house was so interested and kind about her, I was surprised.”
“You needn’t have been. People who have lived with such a mistress as Madam Betty Calvert must have learned kindness, even if they learned nothing else.”
Dorothy laughed. “Dear Mr. Seth, you love my darling Aunt Betty, too, don’t you, like everybody does?”