This was done, and the orphans were so happy and so grateful that the seven could not but feel that their Sunnyside Club was fulfilling its mission by bringing so much joy into the lonely lives of these two girls.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE HOUSE BY THE WOOD
The following afternoon Adele Doring and Gertrude Willis, hand in hand, skipped along Cherry Lane on their way to Granny Dorset’s. The leaves on the trees were yellow, and fluttered down on them as they passed. Dear Granny Dorset, who had not walked for many a year, was sitting on the sunny front porch in her pillowed chair. She looked up brightly as the girls opened the gate, calling gayly, “Here come my little Sunshine Maidens. What good news have you to-day?”
Granny Dorset’s own middle-aged daughter was so busy with housekeeping and making ends meet that she seldom knew what happened in the village of Sunnyside, and so these girls often hunted up bits of happy gossip to take to the little old lady.
Sitting on the edge of the porch, Gertrude replied, “Oh, Granny Dorset, did you know that Jane Dally has the darlingest new baby? It was christened last Sunday, and when father held it in his arms, it smiled up at him, and it has the sweetest dimple. Old Grandfather Dally stood up with it, and how his face did shine with pride and happiness!”
“’Lijah Dally a grandad again!” the old lady said brightly. “Well, to think of that now. He and I were children together. Della, his dad was one of your grandpa’s sheep-herders, and when he was a little fellow he lived in that cabin over in the meadows.”
“Oh, Granny, did he really?” Adele asked eagerly.
This indeed was the object of the girls’ visit, to find out what other old people, now living in the village, had been young when Granny Dorset was a girl, so that they might invite them to Granny’s surprise-party.
Then Gertrude asked a direct question: “Is there any one else living around here who was young when you were?”
“Not so many now,” the old lady replied thoughtfully. “Some have moved away and some have gone to the better country, but there’s old Mr. and Mrs. Quigley,—they as had to go to the poorhouse when their cabin burned down. They had lived in it for nigh forty year, and they always did for others when they had it, but when they needed help themselves, folks let them go on the county.”