"Now, ain't that mighty nice, Mother?" they heard Cross Moore say to the fretful woman. "To go spinning about the old roads around Polktown would do you good."
"Oh, you got more uses for your money, Cross Moore, than flitterin' it away on sech things. If you spent money as careless as them Days does,—look at the hole Jase Day is into right now—you'd be 'Owin" Moore, 'stead o' Cross Moore."
"Do you know," Lottie said to Janice as they drove on, "I think Miz' Cross Moore would be lots happier if—maybe—she had an echo."
"An echo?"
"Yes," the child said, nodding her head. "Like me. You know, I should have been awfully lonesome, and maybe as short-tempered as she is, if I couldn't have talked to my echo."
"Why?" Janice asked curiously, for the philosophy of the little girl interested her.
"Why," Lottie said, still speaking seriously, "my echo was worse off than I was. Yes it was. It couldn't get away from where it was—not even to fly across the cove—unless I told it to. It had to stay right there in the pine woods on Pine Point. But even while I was blind I could find my way about."
"Very true," agreed Janice, likewise serious. "The echo is a poor little prisoner."
"So it is! so it is!" laughed Lottie gayly, for these queer little imaginings and fancies were part of her very nature. Then she grew grave once more. "You 'member how I went to look for it that time, and it snowed so hard, and Mr. Nelson Haley came to find me? He found me, but I never did find out just where that echo lived. I was 'most afraid it had gone for good, but it was there yet the last time I was down here."
While she was speaking the car ran down to the shore of Pine Cove at a beautiful but rather retired spot with an old fish-house and disused wharf in the foreground and, across the placid pool, the sheltering arm of Pine Point, thickly grown with tall pines. Against the wall of the pine wood Lottie's voice echoed back to her with almost uncanny distinctness as she stood in her old place on the wharf.