“Lazuli-bunting?” Haidee echoed. “What a cosy name. I suppose the baby birds are called baby buntings, Joey.”
Joey looked up in her face with adoration in his brown eyes, and she moved a little forward and pressed his head gently back against her knee. They contemplated each other with a sort of radiant satisfaction.
“No one ever told me about baby buntings,” Joey declared at last.
“What a shame! Mr. Dale, do you know you have neglected Joey’s education?”
Very slowly and prettily Haidee repeated the old rhyme, her fingers stroking the lad’s sunburnt cheek. Wanza’s eyes were very big and strangely burning as they rested on her. And her lips were drawn into a straight, unlovely red line as she finally dropped her regard to her tatting. I carved in silence, and the lazuli-bunting was forgotten as the recital of the nursery rhyme led to the demand for others.
“Wanza,” I teased, going up behind her in the kitchen later, and reaching round to tickle her chin with a ribbon grass as she bent over the ironing board. “Wanza, why so pensive? Where are your smiles?”
“She smiles enough for both,” Wanza retorted, giving an angry flirt to the ruffle she was ironing. “I don’t know which is the worst—your smiley kind or your everlasting scolds. Mrs. Olds would sour the cream—and Mrs. Batterly’s eternal smirk makes me think of a sick calf. And when I feel like rushing around and biting the furniture it’s just enough to kill me, so it is, to have her so purry and mealy-mouthed.”
“But why should you want to rush around and bite the furniture?” I asked in bewilderment.
“Oh, just because I’m a great big rough, mean-tempered country girl! I’ve never had real bringing up.” Tears stood in Wanza’s stormy eyes. “No perfect lady ever felt like biting anything. Oh, please go away, Mr. Dale, and leave me be—I’m cross and tired—and not fit to be noticed!”
I saw Mrs. Olds smiling palely at me from the door of the sick room. She tiptoed forward.