And in a measure Rose’s wish was gratified, for Polly did not soon recover from her hurt and shame and did not refer again either to Miss Adams or her own future ambition. Apparently, so far as any one knew, she had given up all thought of it, for she settled down more seriously to the work of the Camp Fire, gaining each month additional honors, and was also working to acquire a prize at school. Of course she had to forgive Mollie her part in her discomfiture; Mollie was so truly repentant once she discovered how deep was her sister’s hurt and Polly with all her faults was not one to cherish anger. Then by and by she also made up with Meg, though it was a good many years before she had exactly the same intimate feeling with her as she had with the other Camp Fire girls. In future years it was always Mollie and Meg who were particularly intimate. But there was one person whom Polly could not bring herself to pardon. For the rest of that winter she never again spoke to Billy Webster. He and Mollie remained good friends and sometimes with another girl used to take walks together, so that Polly saw him now and then at the cabin and oftentimes when she was walking or driving through his father’s woods. However, though he never failed to raise his hat to her, she always behaved as though he were made of thin air and so impossible for her to behold.
However, Polly had not given up her ambition in spite of her altered behavior. Nevertheless, the shock to her pride had, though she did not herself realize it, been extremely good for her, making her realize how silly her pretensions must seem to other people. And so through this, and by watching Esther Clark go quietly ahead with her music, working steadily without asking either for reward or admiration, she learned several valuable lessons. Besides, Polly was so truly happy in the thought that her beloved mother was to return home early in the spring.
Mrs. O’Neill had written her daughters that she was coming home in April and that she had a wonderful secret to tell them which she hoped they would rejoice in for her sake. She also said that an old Irish uncle had died during her stay abroad and had left to Mollie and Polly a legacy of two thousand dollars each, so that they need have no worry about their education. If it were possible Mrs. O’Neill hoped to see Mrs. Ashton before coming back to America, so that she could bring Betty and Dick a better report of their father’s exact condition than letters had yet been able to give them.
CHAPTER XVII
General News
The final winter months passed peacefully and fairly uneventfully at the Sunrise cabin, with the girls following a regular routine of school and Camp Fire work and receiving new honors at each monthly meeting of their Council Fire. So far Esther Clark, Mollie O’Neill and, strangely enough, Nan Graham, had earned the greatest number of honor beads, for since Nan’s unpleasant day at home a new incentive seemed to have been added to her first ambition to make herself an attractive and capable woman. What this incentive was she confided only to her two most admired friends, Rose Dyer and Polly, but by a Polly channel the news also reached Betty Ashton’s ears. Nan’s former good-for-nothing brother, Anthony, had disappeared, but had written his sister two letters declaring that he was hard at work, keeping straight, and, though he did not wish anyone to know where he was, some day when he could feel that Nan might be proud instead of ashamed of him, meant to come home. In the meantime he urged Nan to stick close to her Camp Fire friends and to work.
Therefore there was only one Wood Gatherer now within the Sunrise club circle and this the small Abbie, whom Dr. Barton and Sylvia had introduced with such an amazing lack of tact on Christmas eve. For several weeks after her arrival the girls had simply permitted her to live on at the cabin enjoying their outdoor life, their healthy diet and watching the faint roses bloom in her cheeks but without the faintest idea of ever asking her to become a member of the Sunrise club. In the first place the child was too impossibly young, a bare thirteen, when most of the other girls were now approaching seventeen and grown-up-ness, and it was an unwritten Camp Fire law that the girls in a single group should be as nearly as possible of the same age. If Abbie had only been as old as her years, but she was not even that, and yet somehow this very babyishness and oddity finally won her admittance to the magic circle paradoxical as it may seem.
Perchance the club may have needed a baby now that “Little Brother” had returned, to live in his own home, anyhow, Abbie, almost before any one was aware of it, was occupying this position. Before her arrival Sylvia Wharton had been the youngest member of the Sunrise club, but there had never been anything particularly youthful or clinging about Sylvia; indeed, she had been about the most independent and self-reliant of the girls and therefore she found it very difficult to understand her own special protégé.
Abbie’s name wasn’t Abbie at all, but Abigail Faith Abbott, and once the romantic Polly made this discovery, Faith the little girl became to the entire club. Faith had lived a curiously solitary life apart from all other children. It was true her mother kept boarders in a downtown house in old Boston that had once belonged to her great-grandfather, but Faith had been kept away from them as much as possible and because of her ill health had never been allowed to go to school. It was because of her many illnesses that young Dr. Barton took an interest in the child. Her father was dead and her mother too busy with many cares to see much of her, so most of the young girl’s life had been spent in a small room at the top of an old house, which had an ever-closed window through which she could look out upon miles of chimney tops with every now and then a more aspiring steeple. So was it much of a wonder that the little lonely girl lived with fancies instead of realities and that as a result of all these things she now looked as though a harsh New Hampshire wind might easily blow her away? The children Faith had played with had never been real children at all, but two little spirit sisters whom she had imaged in her own mind for so long now that she could not remember when first she had thought of them. Nevertheless, it was with them that she constantly played and, if left alone, occasionally she spoke to them aloud. Of course Faith was old enough now to understand the absurdity of this and had made up her mind never to betray herself at the cabin. Yet within a short time after her arrival and because of her dreadful homesickness, Miss Dyer made the discovery. Unfortunately Sylvia, who had taken the little visitor’s physical training sternly in hand, also found out the fancy.
Faith did not go into town to school with the other girls, for by the doctor’s and Sylvia’s advice she was to spend all her time outdoors on the cabin front porch wrapped up in rugs. It was rather cold and dull with only the Sunrise Hill before her, the now frozen lake, where the girls skated in the late afternoons, and the long, dark avenue of pines. However, in the beginning of her experience Faith confessed to herself that she liked the loneliness far better than so many and such amazingly enterprising girls. With an almost desperate shyness she clung to Rose Dyer as the one grown-up person who faintly suggested her own mother and to Sylvia’s ministrations she yielded herself without protesting, but for some weeks she never spoke one word to any of the older girls except in answering a question addressed to her. Indeed, when evening came and the others gathered about their log fire to talk, the little stranger used to slip away to be cuddled like a baby in old Mammy’s arms until Sylvia, who wished her to retire an hour before any one else and have a special late supper of milk and eggs, would come and bear her off to be put to bed.
One morning Rose had been feeling worried at having been compelled to leave Faith so long outdoors alone without even going to the door to speak to her. The guardian’s hands had been unusually full that morning with Mammy, who ordinarily helped a little with the work while the girls were away, laid up with rheumatism. Also Rose knew that Max, the big St. Bernard dog who had arrived almost at the same time with Faith, spent most of his time with the little girl, and so she let the whole matter slip her mind until it was time to carry out her midday lunch. Then she smiled a little ruefully as she paused for a moment before opening the front door, wondering if Dr. Barton could guess just how much this child had added to her responsibilities and whether he would care seriously if he did. With his own devotion to looking after the sick (really he seemed totally indifferent to people who were well) doubtless he would take everything as a matter of course. In his visits to the cabin since Christmas certainly nothing more had been said on the subject. Rose laughed and then sighed, pausing with the door to the porch half open and listening. Faith was evidently not alone, for she could distinctly hear her talking to some one although unable to catch any answers.