The girls managed to find three rather rickety old chairs, and these they drew as close to the stove as they could without scorching their clothes. They tried to draw the children into their laps, but the children were either too miserable to want to be touched by strangers or they had become a little shy. At any rate, they drew away so sharply that one of them nearly fell on the stove. This frightened them all and they began to cry dismally.
The girls were glad when Mrs. Haddon returned with three shabby but warm little bath robes which she hung close to the stove. Then she undressed the children quickly, rubbed their little bodies till they were in a glow, then slipped them into the snug robes.
And all the time she was doing it she kept up a running fire of conversation with the girls.
“Thank goodness,” she said, “I only missed the children a little while ago. They have always been so good to play close to the house, and I was so busy I didn’t look out as usual. And to think that they ran away and fell into the lake! Well, it’s only one more trouble, that’s all. It’s funny how a person can become used to trouble after a while.”
“But it would have been so much worse,” Billie suggested, gently, “if the kiddies had fallen through into deeper water.”
“Eh?” said Mrs. Haddon, looking up at Billie quickly, then down again. “Yes, I suppose that would have been worse.” Then she added, with a bitterness the girls did not understand: “It isn’t often that the worst doesn’t happen to me.”
Puzzled, the girls looked at each other, then around the bare, specklessly clean little kitchen.
That Mrs. Haddon was very poor, there could be no doubt. The shabbiness of the place, her dress, and the children’s clothes all showed that. But could poverty alone account for the sadness in her voice?
Mrs. Haddon had once been a very pretty woman, and she was sweet looking yet, in spite of the lines of worry about her mouth. She had lovely hair, black as night and thick, but she had arranged it carelessly, and long strands of it had pulled loose from the pins and straggled down over her forehead. At this moment, as though she felt the eyes of the girls upon her, she flung the untidy hair back with an impatient movement.
“How old are the kiddies?” asked Laura, feeling that the silence was becoming awkward. “They look almost the same age.”