“Where is she? Is she—still living?” Jane’s usually steady voice was unsteady.
“No. She’s to be buried—within the hour. I just found it out—and came for you. I thought you might like to go.”
“I’ll be ready in three minutes. I’ll lock the shop——”
Thus it was that two more people were shortly on their way to the place where little Sadie Dunstan, unhonoured and unmourned—except for one—lay waiting for the last offices earth could give her. But she was to have greater dignity shown her than she could have hoped.
“I did try to make a real woman of her,” said Jane, in a smothered voice, when Red had told her what he knew of the pitiful story. Passing the small house that morning he had seen the sign upon the door, and remembering Jane Ray’s lost protégée, had stopped to inquire. A neighbour had given him the tragic little history; the old grandmother, deaf and half blind in her chimney corner, had added a harsh comment or two; and only a young girl who said she was Sadie’s sister and had but an hour before suddenly appeared from the unknown, had shown that she cared what had happened to Sadie.
“You did a lot for her,” asserted Burns. “I think the girl meant to be straight. This was one of those under-promise-of-marriage affairs which get the weak ones now and then. Poor little girl—she wouldn’t have wanted you to know—or me. She didn’t give me a chance—though there probably wasn’t one, anyway, by the time she got back here. I’ve had her under my care many a time in her girlhood, you know—she was a frail little thing, but mighty appealing. This younger sister is a good deal like her, as she looked when you took her first.”
“I knew she had a sister, but thought she was far away somewhere.”
“In an orphanage till this last year. She’s only sixteen—a flower of a girl—and crying her heart out for Sadie. The grandmother’s a brute—the child can’t stay with her.”
“She’ll not have to. I can make it up to Sadie—and I will.”
Burns looked at the face in profile beside him. Jane Ray had a profile which might have been characterized as sturdily sweet; the lines were extremely attractive. Jane’s quiet dress, the simple hat upon her head, were the last word in expensive, well-conceived fashion, but Burns did not know this. He only knew that Miss Ray always looked precisely as she ought to look—very nice, and a little distinguished, so that one noticed her approvingly, and people who did not know her usually wondered who she was. He was thinking as he glanced at her now that if she meant to make it up to Sadie by taking her young sister under her care, that sister would have an even better chance than Sadie had had—and lost.