“Get up, you Angeline,” ordered Theresa, clutching her by the arm. “You ain’t asleep, I know your tricks. Get up this minute, I want to talk with you.”
The child came shivering into the outer room.
“Now tell me this minute,” commanded her aunt, “every single thing that happened this afternoon at my house. Don’t you leave out anything, and don’t you tell me a falsehood, or it’ll be the worse for you.”
So the wretched Angeline, shaking with cold and sobbing from fright, confessed to the affair of the broken chocolate-cup.
“There! What did I tell you,” demanded Theresa of Mrs. McGaffey when the story was done. “I knew there was something wrong somewhere, or she’d have gotten the place, sure as preaching. Her tricks will be the ruin of us all before she’s through, I tell you, Harriet. She ought to be beat, that’s what ought to be done to her. She’s a bad child, right through. Why, Mrs. Hamilton as good as told me the whole thing was settled and Angeline was to go straight up to the nursery then and there, and you was to get sixteen dollars a month for the loan of her. The young un that’s there now is nothing to look at—nothing next to Angeline, but she got the place because she hasn’t underhand ways and doesn’t try to make other people suffer for her faults. But I’ll pay her off before I’m through with her, never you fear. In the meantime if I could just punish this child here for her foolishness, it’d do me a world of good. Now go back to bed, you Angeline McGaffey, and if I ever catch you deceiving again and running your mother and me into danger of being disgraced, I’ll attend to you, rest assured of that.”
Angeline crept off to her room, greatly relieved that she had escaped so easily at the hands of her vixenish aunt. She was accustomed by this time, to loud and angry talking, and did not let herself be much disturbed by it. In a very little while, therefore, and long before her Aunt Theresa had gone, she was asleep and dreaming, and the next day she had forgotten all about it. But Theresa did not forget. She had told her sister that she meant to bide her time and wait her chance, but that in the end she’d get even with Polly for having cut Angelina out, as she expressed it, and she intended to keep her word.
After her tumble down-stairs, and the whispered warning James had given her, Polly managed to avoid Theresa. It was not very difficult to do this, for the children spent most of their time in the open air or in the nursery. The cold and stupid morning walks that Priscilla had used to dread, she now looked forward to with pleasure, and her skin and eyes were beginning to show the difference. Miss Cissy’s plan was working like a charm—there could be no doubt about that.
Priscilla, in her quiet, shy little way, had grown to love Polly dearly, and as for Polly, why, she simply adored Priscilla, and would have done anything in the world for her. She “gave up” so entirely in fact, that Hannah often had to interfere to save Priscilla from becoming selfish through too much indulgence. When they played house, Polly was always the baby and Priscilla the mother; when they played school, Polly was the scholar and Priscilla the teacher. In las’-tag, Polly was “It,” no matter how often she caught Priscilla, and when Hannah shook her finger at her, she was sure to whisper: “She’s so little, you know. She can’t run as fast as I can, and it isn’t fair. ’Sides, she likes to think she’s beating. When she las’-tags me she laughs right out loud, she’s so pleased.”
“Well, you mustn’t spoil her, that’s all,” warned Hannah, but she confided to James on more than one occasion that, “that Polly’s a caution. I never saw her equal. She don’t know what it means to think of herself. And the grown-up way she’s got with her, of looking out for Priscilla! Why, you’d think she’d been used to protecting some one all her life.”