“Ah, but Grace was very wrong,” said Phronsie sadly; “and she can’t help it, Polly, when it all comes over her again. Just think, she disobeyed her aunt.”
“To disobey mother” had always been such a heinous crime in the “Pepper children’s” eyes, that Polly’s work dropped in her lap, and she sat as still as Phronsie for the space of a moment. Then she said brightly to cheer Phronsie, “But it doesn’t help matters any to cry over it. Yet to be sure,” very suddenly, “I cried dreadfully when I’d been cross and hateful to Mrs. Chatterton. To be sure, so I did.”
Suddenly Polly laid down her work, and went swiftly out of the room. She positively ran into the pretty bed-chamber where, under the white hangings, Grace was sobbing her young heart out.
“Dear child,” said Polly, kneeling down by the bed, and laying a steady and gentle hand on the shaking figure, “I know just how you feel; for I cried once, just as miserably as you are crying, because I had been wicked.”
“You wicked!” cried Grace, backing up so suddenly that Polly was nearly upset, “O Mrs. King, that could never be!”
“Ah, Grace, but it was; and it was much worse for me to be wicked, for I had had Mamsie all my life,—and you don’t know what our Mamsie was,—while you have been away from your mother, you said, ever since you were six years old.”
“Dear child,” said Polly, “I know just how you feel.”
“Yes,” said Grace. It was some relief that she did not have to tell that boarding-school life as she had found it in New England schools was ever so many degrees better than those years could have been under the nominal care of a mother given up to her own pursuits.
“And I was rude and hateful to a poor sick old woman,” said Polly suddenly, laying her soft, warm hand on Grace’s shaking ones; “and I said awfully cruel things to her, Grace; oh, you can’t think how it makes me feel now to remember them!”