“But you promised long ago that you wouldn’t call me company,” Miss Bayley protested.
“I know I did,” Dixie smiled over the big yellow bowl which held the foamy cheese, and into which she was pouring rich cream. “I don’t understand the least bit why, but somehow I feel as if to-day were an extra occasion, sort of a party.”
“Perhaps because it’s the first real spring day that we’ve had,” Miss Bayley announced, as she opened the old walnut sideboard and brought forth the best china. “Your mother liked beautiful things, didn’t she, Dixie? This pattern is lovely.”
The girl looked up brightly. “I like it,” she replied; then added simply, “I suppose it was hard for Mother to live in a cabin, for all her life had been spent in an old colonial mansion in the South. Our great-aunt, Mrs. James Haddington-Allen, lives there, or, at least, I guess she does. She’s never answered any of our letters, but she always writes something on the envelopes before she returns them, so of course she does receive them.”
“Have you written to her lately?” Miss Bayley was setting the table as she asked the question. She was surprised at the decided tone in which the small girl replied: “No, I haven’t. I never wrote her but once, and that was after we children were left all alone. Our mother had often written, but her letters were always returned unopened.”
“Mrs. James Haddington-Allen must be a hard-hearted old dragoness,” the girl-teacher thought; but aloud she commented, “If your great-aunt could but see you four children, I am sure she would love you all.”
“She might love Carol because she is beautiful, like our mother, and she’d like Jimmy-Boy too, but Ken and I are regular Martins, so probably our great-aunt wouldn’t like us much.” To the surprise of the listener, there was a sob in the girl’s voice as she continued, “I’d heaps rather our great-aunt would never come, for probably she’d want to take Carol and Jimmy-Boy to her fine Southern home, but she wouldn’t want Ken or me. I—I just couldn’t live without Carol and Jimmy-Boy. I couldn’t. I couldn’t!”
Miss Bayley went toward the girl and took her in her arms. “My dear child,” she said tenderly, “before I’d let that happen, I would open up my old home in New York on the Hudson and adopt all four of you.”
Dixie smiled through her tears. “Goodness!” she said, springing away and wiping her eyes on the towel by the kitchen pump, “the cheese is salty enough as ’tis. I mustn’t spill any tears in it.”
Dixie had not grasped the meaning of the words she had heard. To her, Miss Bayley was just a poor young woman who had to teach school for a living, and a home in New York on the Hudson presented no picture to the girl who had always lived in the mountains, and who had never been farther away than Genoa. But to Miss Bayley those words had meant much. Why had she never thought of it before, she wondered. If Frederick Edrington never came back to her, if he had found, while away from her, that he had been mistaken, that he did not really care, still her life need not be empty.