“Where?”
“O, please don’t ask me where, but he had a satchel and seemed to have come from the cars. He said he was a friend of yours and was coming to ask you to take his little sister. I don’t suppose he did call?”
“O, never.”
“This is the part that troubles me, and it did even before he looked over the fence at us to-day. He managed in some way to find out from the girls that Elfie is here.”
“How unfortunate!” exclaimed Mrs. Abbott. “O, Marion, our dear little girl is in danger. How could those girls tell him?”
“Don’t be so frightened, Mrs. Abbott. I am sure no one can steal Elfie while we are watching her so closely. You, Candace, or I have her in sight every moment. And I think—yes, I am quite certain—that I would risk my life for her any moment.”
“I am sure you would, dear, and I am so thankful that I trusted you with this matter, which ought to be a secret, because Mr. Bellamy is especially anxious that his darling’s life should never, either now or in the future, be darkened by the knowledge of what he fears for her. She is a sensitive, imaginative child, and if she were haunted by a fear of being taken—stolen is not too hard a word to call it—she would become nervously anxious, with the probable result of confirmed ill health.”
“Poor little Elfie!”
“Dear, dear child,” said Mrs. Abbott; “she is well worth watching and caring for, and yet the responsibility has become so complicated now by this new aspect of the situation that I bitterly regret having assumed it. I wish I had advised the senator to take Ethel and Candace abroad with him.”
“It cannot be helped now,” said Marion, respectfully, “and our heavenly Father can watch her here as well as there.”