Elizabeth nodded. Laura could not induce her to talk, but still she felt that somehow she had penetrated a little way into the shell of silence and reserve. As they went back across the camp, she dropped her arm over Elizabeth’s shoulders, and said,
“You’re a splendid helper, Elizabeth. May I call on you the next time I need any one?”
Another silent nod, and then the girl slipped back into her place beside Olga.
“Then I will—and thank you,” Laura returned as she passed on. Olga glanced after her with something odd and inscrutable in her dark eyes, and there was a question in the look with which she searched the face of Elizabeth. But she did not put the question into words.
Afterwards Laura spoke to her friend of the Poor Thing with a new hopefulness, telling how willingly she had helped with the peas.
“You know I’ve tried in vain to get her to do other things, but this time she was so quick to respond! I’m almost afraid to hope, but maybe I’ve had an inspiration. I must try the child again though before I can feel at all sure.”
She made her second trial the next day, when she sent Bessie Carroll to ask Elizabeth to help her with the dishes. “It’s my day to work in the kitchen,” Bessie told her, “and Miss Laura thought you might be willing to help me. Most of the girls, you know, hate the kitchen work. You don’t, do you?”
“I like to help,” replied Elizabeth promptly.
“I like Elizabeth!” Bessie confided to Laura that night. “Before, I’ve tried to get her into things because she seemed so lonesome and ‘out of it,’ don’t you know? But I like her now, she was so willing to help me to-day. I thought she was awfully slow, but she was quick as anybody with the dishes.”
Then Laura felt sure she had found the key. “Elizabeth loves to help,” she told Anne Wentworth.