The doctor strongly urged that she should go to the workhouse infirmary. "She will be well nursed and looked after there," he said, "and she will be provided with all she requires," but she herself showed such violent opposition that at last, in fear for her health, they ceased to press it. Had they done so, she would surely have run away. At the same time she had no other home, no means, and what powers she had had of earning any were fast failing her.
"I thought you'd be able to help me, now you'm getting on so well," she said to Huldah. "We fed and clothed and did everything for you, and now's your chance of returning some of it." Then her mood changed, and she wept and moaned, and clung to the girl passionately. "Don't you leave me!" she pleaded, hysterically; "don't you go and turn your back on me, too. You was mine before you was hers," nodding her head towards Mrs. Perry.
Her clinging to Huldah was more than a passing fancy, as they found, when they tried to get her to go into a home where she could have had rest and change and food and nursing. She sobbed and pleaded, then flatly refused to go, unless Huldah went too.
"She's the only one in the world I know," she cried. "Don't send me away with strangers, they'll all look down on me, and—and I—no, I couldn't bear it. I won't go, I won't, I won't! I'll go off on the tramp again, where none of you will ever find me, and I won't ever bother any of you any more."
At last Huldah went with tears in her eyes to Miss Carew. "I'll have to go with her, miss," she said, piteously. "She can't go away on the tramp all by herself. I can keep us both pretty well. I must go with her, Miss Rose, wherever she goes; she hasn't got anybody else."
This of course they could not allow. They could never send such a child as Huldah out into the world, with only a dying woman as companion and protector, to live where and how she could, in nobody knew what dreadful haunts. So it was decided between them that Emma Smith was to settle down amongst them, and Huldah must leave Mrs. Perry and go to live with her. No lodgings could be found for her, for in that village the houses were not big enough to hold in comfort even the families that lived in them, and there was certainly no room for a lodger. And houses were as scarce as lodgings.
At last a brilliant idea came to Miss Carew, and with her father's permission she hurried off with the good news.
"You shall have the two rooms over our coach-house," she cried, delightedly, for it was a real relief to her to feel that Huldah would be so near her, and under her own eye. "They are a good size, and dry and airy; and we must all pull together to get what furniture we can."
Huldah's face grew brighter and brighter with every word Miss Rose uttered, for she had begun to fear that they would have to go elsewhere.
To be near Miss Rose, too, would help to make up for the pain of leaving Aunt Martha and Dick and the cottage, a parting which had been weighing on her more heavily than she would have liked anyone to know. Dick, it was decided, was to remain with Mrs. Perry, for without him she declared she could not live on in the cottage when Huldah was gone.