But they watched, with keen interest, the course of events.
“I can’t see what she finds worth bothering with in those Italians,” would likely be Louise’s answer.
Barbara’s attitude was defiant. She would have nothing said about Nicky. Cara alone dared to suggest to her that one just can’t understand strange children. But even Cara could not deter her. Nor could her father, no, not even the bossy Dora, who had no business to order Barbara to give up her interest in “those youngsters.”
But this afternoon something had happened that had influenced Barbara. Nicky had run away from her. He must have seen her wave to him to come up to the car, when Dr. Hale was driving her and Miss Davis home, and he had scurried off behind those old boxes like a—like a—no, Babs wouldn’t say it; she wouldn’t even think it. Nicky must have had some good reason for that suspicious act.
Tonight she tried to read; there was her favorite magazine that had just come by mail, but she could find nothing to interest her in its usually fascinating pages.
“If I had had a little brother,” she was thinking, “I should have liked his eyes to be like Nicky’s. They’re such an agate brown, like my best marbles,” she concluded.
That gave her a new idea. Where was that bag of marbles? She had always kept them, loved to count them and shoot them on the old braided rug that Dora insisted was best in front of Barbara’s bed.
As the idea came to her she jumped up and she rummaged in the drawer of her stand, where her things least in use were stored, and after going to the very bottom several times she unearthed the little gingham bag. The marbles in it seemed to caress her fingers as she held them even through the gingham cover; she had always loved to play marbles.
Down on the rug she squatted again and set the agates on the faded blue line. Then, just as she used to do when she was ten years old, and even as young as six years old, she began to play.
Knock! Knock! she hit the brown “real.”