A tear or two crept out of Polly’s eyes as she said this, and dropped on the counterpane.
“Why, you’re crying yourself, Mrs. King!” exclaimed Grace, lifting her red, swollen eyelids in astonishment.
“I know it,” said Polly, smiling brightly, and dashing off the tears with a quick hand. “You can’t think how it makes me feel, Grace, after all these years, to remember what I said to old Mrs. Chatterton.”
“She must have been horrid to you to have made you say those things,” said Grace stoutly. “I just hate her, to make you feel badly even now.”
It was a new thing to comfort any one else and she pulled away one of her hands from Polly’s clasp, and laid it on Mrs. King’s shoulder, forgetting her own misery while she did so.
“She didn’t make me,” corrected Polly, “never mind what she said to me. Mamsie always used to say no one but ourselves could make us do and say things. No, Grace; it was because I lost my temper. Oh, I was so frightfully angry, I remember! And then I went up-stairs as hard as I could run, wishing every step that I could only get back the words I had uttered; and I hid in the trunk-room, and got down on the floor, and cried and cried—oh, how I cried! And then, when I finally came out and went down-stairs, everybody was hurrying about, troubled and anxious, because Mrs. Chatterton was ill; and then I thought that I had killed her.”
“Oh, dear me!” said Grace.
“And after that,” went on Polly, “I can’t tell you how I felt. But I didn’t cry any more. I just tried to do something for the poor woman. And after the longest time, Grandpapa told me Mrs. Chatterton had received bad news,—her favorite nephew had been drowned at sea.”
“I’m glad of that,” said Grace. “I mean, I’m glad that you knew it wasn’t anything you had said that made her sick. Well, do please go on, Mrs. King.”
“This all happened—the telegram coming, I mean—while I was up in the trunk-room,” said Polly; “so of course I did not hear the news, though everybody thought I had. But I felt, oh, so dreadfully, that I had made her unhappy just before that awful blow came. And I shall always remember it.”