“I think that would be just like him, Dolly. He’s been awfully good to me. I suppose it’s because he thinks it will please Miss Eleanor, and he knows that she likes us, and wants to do things for us.”
“Oh, I know he likes you, too, Bessie. He certainly ought to, after the way you brought him help back there in Hamilton, when we were there for the trial of those gypsies who kidnapped us. If it hadn’t been for you, there’s no telling what that thief might have done to him.”
“Oh, anyone would have done the same thing, Dolly. It was for my sake that he was in trouble, and when I had a chance to help him, it was certainly the least that I could do. Don’t you think so?”
“Well, maybe that’s so, but there aren’t many girls who would have known how to do what you did or who would have had the pluck to do it, even if they did. I’m quite sure I wouldn’t, and yet I’d have wanted to, just as much as anyone.”
“I wish I did know something about my father and mother, Dolly. You’ve no idea how much that worries me. Sometimes I feel as if I never would find out anything.”
“Oh, you mustn’t get discouraged, Bessie. Try to be as cheerful as you are when it’s someone else who is in trouble. You’re the best little cheerer-up I know when I feel blue.”
“Oh, Dolly, I do try to be cheerful, but it’s such a long time since they left me with the Hoovers!”
“Well, there must be some perfectly good reason for it all, Bessie, I feel perfectly sure of that. They would never have gone off that way unless they had to.”
“Oh, it isn’t that that bothers me. It’s feeling that unless something dreadful had happened to them, I’d have heard of them long ago. And then, Maw Hoover and Jake Hoover were always picking at me about them. When I did something Maw Hoover didn’t like, she’d say she didn’t wonder, that she couldn’t expect me to be any good, being the child of parents who’d gone off and left me on her hands that way.”
“That’s all right for her to talk that way, but she didn’t have you on her hands. She made you work like a slave, and never paid you for it at all. You certainly earned whatever they spent for keeping you, Miss Eleanor says so, and I’ll take her word any time against Maw Hoover or anyone else.”