“You’re right, kiddie—he’s one of the bunch,” Lena answered, her face softening as she looked down into the eager gray eyes.
“Gee! Jo’s sister!” Jim repeated. “I wish Jo was here too. I s’pose,” he glanced at Miss Laura, “you couldn’t squeeze in just one more boy?”
Laura shook her head. “Not into these meetings. But you can invite Lena’s brother to come and see you, if you like.”
“O bully!” Jim cried out and turned again to Lena. “You tell him, won’t you?”
“I will, sure,” she promised, and Jim reluctantly released her hand.
The girls begged that he might stay, and though Jim’s tongue was silent his eyes pleaded too, so Miss Laura conceded, “Just for a while then, if you’ll be very quiet so as not to get too tired,” and with a contented smile Jim leaned back against his cushions and looked and listened. When the girls chanted the Fire Ode his eyes widened with pleasure and he listened with keen interest to the recital of “gentle deeds.” Even Olga gave one this time. Jim’s eyes studied her grave face, his own almost as grave, and when later she passed his chair, he caught her dress and said very low, “Put down your head. I want to ask you something.”
Olga impatiently jerked her dress from his grasp, but something in his eyes held her against her will, and under cover of a burst of laughter from another group, she leaned over the wheelchair and ungraciously enough asked what he wanted. Jim’s eyes, very earnest and serious now, were looking straight into hers.
“I know what makes you keep away from the others and look so—so—dif’rent. You’re lonesome like I was at the hospital. Is it your mother, too?”
Olga’s face went dead white and for an instant her eyes flamed so fiercely that the boy shrank away with a little gasp of fear. But the next moment she was looking at him with eyes full of tears—a long silent look—then, without a word, she was gone.
The first time that Jim came downstairs to dinner he was very shy and spoke only in answer to a question. But his awe of Judge Haven and the servants soon wore off, and his questions and comments began to interest the judge. When one evening after dinner Laura was called to the telephone, the judge laid aside his paper and called the boy to him. Jim promptly limped across the room and stood at the judge’s knee, his gray eyes looking steadily into the keen blue ones above him.