Happy childhood, when nothing that happens can banish sweet sleep from our eyelids! How many of us, grown to man’s estate, would give all that such an estate confers upon us for the privilege of closing our eyes and forgetting as easily and as quickly as Gertie Heckett forgot all that happened to her during the most eventful day in her little life!
CHAPTER XXIV.
OLD SWEETHEARTS.
Ruth Adrian had only gathered from what Gertie had told her that Marston was in danger of being betrayed by his companions. The child had heard but a portion of the conversation, and even all of that she could not remember.
Ruth concluded that Marston had been mixed up in something that was, she feared, discreditable, and that he was to be made a scapegoat.
If this was so, the sooner he was warned the better. But how was she to warn him? She did not even know where he lived, and before she could find out it might be too late.
He might be living under an assumed name; a hundred reasons might prompt him to conceal his identity. What was she to do?
At breakfast she was pale and absent-minded. Her mother noticed it, and taxed her with wilfully destroying her health by worrying about a pack of vagabonds.
Poor Gertie was the ‘pack of vagabonds.’ Fortunately the child had been relegated to the kitchen by Mrs. Adrian’s express command, and did not hear the good lady’s opinion of her. This did not decrease Ruth’s perplexities. She foresaw a constant source of dispute in poor Gertie’s presence. Her mother’s heart was large, but her tongue was bitter; and although doubtless she really heartily sympathised with the child’s friendless and forlorn condition, she would none the less make her a constant target for her arrows.
She determined, therefore, to find, if possible, some nice respectable person with whom Gertie could be placed for a while, and taught to make herself useful. Ruth would pay what she could out of her pocket-money, and she was sure her papa would help her, though Gertie was not a Patagonian nor a South Sea Islander, but only a poor little English outcast.
‘What do you intend to do with this white elephant of yours, Ruth?’ said her mother presently.