CHAPTER XV
THE POOR FARM
Rosemary thought a great deal about the Gays in the days that followed. Louisa had asked her to promise that she would tell no one the precarious state of their finances—"no one can help and I won't be discussed like the 'cases' they bring up at the sewing circle," said Louisa passionately.
"They'd be 'running up' clothes for June and Kitty," she said another time, "and fitting us out to go to the poor farm looking respectable. I'd rather stay here and look any old way."
Sarah was extremely observant for her years and she surprised Rosemary and Louisa with a shrewd comment or two, until the latter deemed it expedient to take her into the inner circle of confidence. Sarah could be loyal and she could be silent. From that day she and Rosemary were leagued with Louisa and Alec to circumvent the town authorities.
Not that authority, in any guise, was ever manifested. At least it had not been so far. Rosemary, on the beautiful moonlight nights when "Old Fiddlestrings" wandered again up and down the road, playing the "Serenade" with his soul in his fingers, found it hard to believe that there could be such ugly things in the world as poverty and fear. She was sure that Louisa and Alec must be mistaken—or else the money would come from somewhere—it must. There could not be such music and such moonlight and such heavenly scented breezes on an earth that was anything but wholly lovely, wholly kind.
"My dear child, you must go to bed," Mrs. Willis remonstrated on the third night when she came in to find Rosemary's room flooded with moonlight and Rosemary herself kneeling at the window. "You can hear the music just as well in bed and I don't like to have you lose so much sleep."
And then she brought a light comfortable from the bed and, wrapped in that, knelt with Rosemary at the window till the player and his violin walked wearily away out of sight. After all, what was the loss of a little sleep as compared with such playing?
"Heard Old Fiddlestrings again last night," said Mr. Hildreth, drawing up before the kitchen door the next morning while Richard carried in the piece of ice they had brought from the creamery for Winnie. "I declare it's a mercy we don't have full moon more than once a month; no one would get a fair night's sleep. Does he bother you?"