Ken turned away and shook the stove. “Girls are queer,” was what he was thinking, but it was with unusual tenderness that he kissed his sister good-night.
CHAPTER TWELVE
CAROL’S NEW HOME
It had been a very excited little girl who had driven in between the high stone gate-posts and had realized that the imposing white mansion-like house set far back among fine old trees, and surrounded by wide velvety lawns and gardens, where a few late flowers were still blooming, was to be her future home. Since the little lass was very like her mother, it was not strange that Carol truly believed that she was receiving only that which it was her right to have.
Little Sylvia Clayburn she knew not at all, and Mrs. Clayburn she remembered vaguely as being a very richly dressed woman who had stopped her at the fair to ask whose little girl she might be, and, as usual, Carol’s reply had been that she was a Haddington-Allen of Kentucky. Later, when Mrs. Clayburn had heard the story of the four orphans from her husband, she had said that she believed this little Carol would be the right child for them to adopt, since they had decided that their precious Sylvia was being spoiled growing up alone.
Nor were they wrong, for Sylvia, pale, thin, and fretful, indeed was very much spoiled. Whenever she cried, her mother gave her candy, and then, of course, she had no desire for plain, healthful foods.
“Sylvia has such aristocratic taste,” the proud mother would say. “She scorns such plebeian food as bread, and will eat nothing but cake.”
No wonder that the child of such a mother should be spoiled and sickly.
It was late afternoon when Mr. Clayburn led Carol into the luxuriously furnished library, where Mrs. Clayburn, reclining on a divan, propped up with many silken pillows, was reading aloud to a small girl who was dressed in the pale pink silk that had so aroused Carol’s envy and admiration.
Languidly the woman lifted her eyes and closed the book when the newcomer approached. “Wife, here is little Carol who has come to pay us a good long visit, I hope,” the kind man said. Then to his own little daughter he added, “Sylvia, won’t you come and shake hands with your new sister?”
Mrs. Clayburn protested. “Samuel,” she said, “haven’t I told you time and again that hand-shaking is effete, obsolete? It is not done now in the best families.”