A hush fell over the two young girls.
The old mansion itself furnished the background and what a melodramatic setting! The mighty Locked Gates, surrounded by the weird trees that sighed and moaned in the night as they swayed and tossed restlessly as though exhausted from their unceasing vigil!
The vivacious chums from Barry Manor were suddenly confronted with a side of life which they were unable to understand. Could this child be the neglected daughter of Cora and Henry Sully?
As Kitty and Doris advanced to the bedside, Etta stared at them in astonishment. Shut up in one room for nearly twenty years she had never seen any one her own age. Only Azalea and Iris had ever visited her and so she had come to think of a world peopled only by adults. Her parents, Henry and Cora Sully, had never taken the trouble to educate her and the only lessons she had ever received were taken from the Bible passages which the Misses Gates read aloud. Though in actual age she was older than either Doris or Kitty, mentally she remained a child. Now, as she viewed the girls and noticed their white dresses, it seemed to her that surely she must be gazing upon two angels.
Too moved for words, an expression of awe and rapture came over her face; she stretched out her thin hand toward Doris.
The two girls took a step nearer toward the bed. The coverlet of the quaint patch-work pattern was faded from many washings and the muslin was yellowed. A twisted, knotted handkerchief had dropped carelessly on a narrow strip of well-worn rag carpet. The whole picture was a far cry from anything that the two girls from boarding school had ever seen or expected to find at Locked Gates.
The poor, unfortunate girl was gowned in an old-fashioned, high-necked night-dress. A bit of yellowed crocheting finished the neck-line, no doubt the work of her grandmother, the dressmaker, who had been the seamstress for the Gates family.
“How do you do?” said Doris, smiling sweetly in an effort to be friendly at once.
“We are visiting here,” added Kitty, also making an effort to be cheerful and to put the cripple at ease with her most charming manner.
“It is a lovely sunny day, my dear. Let me raise the shade so that the light can come in and cheer up the room.” Doris raised the curtain which crinkled and creaked as the sunlight streamed into the bedroom in the attic.