"I wish I could believe that." Mrs. Donovan had lost control of herself and was sobbing bitterly. "Here it is after ten o'clock an' we don't know where the little thing is. Seems if bad luck was taggin' her. It isn't a week since her bird was stolen and now—" she shuddered and hid her face in her apron.
"Nothing's happened to her," repeated Mrs. Schuneman with a poor attempt at firmness. "Nothing could happen to a child like Mary Rose. It's when you're looking for trouble that trouble comes, Mrs. Donovan, and Mary Rose never looked for trouble. She was too busy looking for friends."
"That's what she always said," exclaimed Grandma Johnson; "that the pleasant things come to the people who are looking for pleasant things but, land! see what's happened to her and if anyone ever looked for pleasantness it was Mary Rose. Why she even looked for it in us!" And she laughed harshly.
"And she found it, too," Mrs. Schuneman declared quickly. "Yes, she did. She looked deep enough to find the pleasantness we didn't know was there because we'd covered it up with so much disagreeableness. I'm not ashamed to admit that she made me see that so long as you live in a world with other people you owe some obligation to be agreeable to them. If each of us did our share, as Mary Rose was always asking us to do, we'd find this world a friendlier place than it is."
"She must have said that to me a hundred times," sniffled Miss Adams. "I knew she was right all the time but I wouldn't say so."
"It's easy to get out of the habit of being friendly in the city," murmured Mrs. Matchan. "It's different in the country."
"I guess it's much the same, city or country. If she hadn't found Germania for me I'd have been in an asylum by now," asserted Mrs. Schuneman. "There I was all by myself and while a bird isn't a human being, it's a lot of company. And it's through Germania and Mary Rose that I've got acquainted with all of you."
"If it hadn't been for Mary Rose I doubt if Mr. Bracken would have asked me to go for Harriet," Mrs. Bracken said in a low voice.
It seemed as if each of them had something to say of what Mary Rose had done for her. Mary Rose's friendly nature, her undaunted belief in the friendliness of people and of the world in which she lived had made those whose lives she had touched develop friendliness also. The dozen people gathered in the Donovan living-room said so, quite frankly.
Suddenly the clock struck eleven times. Mrs. Donovan burst into a perfect storm of tears. "She should have been in her bed hours ago!" she sobbed. "An' where is she? Where's Mary Rose?"