Turning to the slender, dark-eyed agent of the model tenements, Gloria remarked: “Will you now tell us a little about yourself, Miss Selenski?”
All through the dinner hour the girls had noticed a happy light that seemed to linger far back in the nearly black orbs of the Hungarian girl, but they thought it was her optimistic nature that gladdened her eyes; but now, in answer to Gloria’s question, the dark, pretty face became radiant as the girl replied: “The past holds little worth the telling, but the future, I believe, will hold much.”
“Oh, Miss Selenski,” Bobs exclaimed, leaning forward eagerly and smiling at their Hungarian friend, “something wonderful is about to happen in your life, I am sure of that.”
Shining-eyed, the dark girl nodded. “Do you want to guess what?”
It was Lena May who answered: “I think you are going to be married,” she said.
“I am,” was the joyfully given reply. “To a young man from my own country who has a business in the Bronx; nor is that all, he owns a little home way out by the park and there is a real yard about it with flowers and trees. Oh, can you understand what it will mean to me to be awakened in the morning by birds instead of by the thundering noise of overhead trains?”
“Miss Selenski,” Gloria said, “we are glad indeed that such a happy future awaits you.” Then turning to little Nell Wiggin, who sat back somewhat in the shadow, though now and then the flickering firelight changed her corn-yellow hair to a halo of golden sheen, she asked kindly: “Is there some bit of your past that you wish to tell us?”
There was something so infinitely sorrowful in the pale pinched face of little Nell Wiggin that instinctively the girls knew that the story they would hear would be sad, nor were they mistaken.
Nell Wiggin began: “It is not interesting, my past, and I fear that it is too sad for a story, but briefly I will tell it: My twin brother, Dean, and I were born on a farm in New England which seemed able to produce but little on its rocky soil, and though our father managed to keep us alive, he could not pay off the mortgage, and each year he grew more troubled in spirit. At last he heard of rich lands in the West that might be homesteaded and so, leaving us one spring, he set out on foot, for he planned taking up a claim, and when he had constructed there a shelter of some kind, Mother was to sell the New England farm, pay off the mortgage and with whatever remained buy tickets that would take us west to my father.
“It was May when he left us. He did not expect to reach his destination for many weeks, as he knew that he would have to stop along the way to work for his food.