“Let us sit here then,” said Elise, “where no one comes. There is a what you call ‘meeting’ which my maman is here to attend. It goes on in the upstairs, and she told me it would meet for an hour or two. Tell me all your woe.”
She pulled Lucy down on a pile of velvet curtains and patting her hot little hand, said softly, “I wait.”
CHAPTER X
“When I was only two years old, my real mamma died,” Lucy commenced, “and papa’s sister, who was a great deal older than papa, came to take care of us. I had a brother five years older than I. Aunt Mabel was so kind to us, and let us do just as we pleased about everything. I don’t see why things could not have gone on like that always, because as soon as I grew up I intended to take charge of the house and run it for papa. I am thirteen now so it wouldn’t have been long before I could have done it. But when I was ten years old, my brother died, and after that, papa stayed away from the house all he could, although Auntie Mabel was always talking to him about his duty to me.
“Well, one day, when I was eleven years old, papa came home, and the very minute I saw his face I knew something had happened.
“‘Goodness, papa,’ I said, ‘you look as though you had had good news!’ ‘I have, my dear,’ he said, and then somehow as I looked at him I had such a funny feeling. All at once I didn’t want to know what made him look so glad. So I just sat there and said nothing.
“‘Don’t you want to know what it is?’ he said, and I said, ‘I don’t know whether I do or not.’