“Why, Grandma Padgett, didn't you see the doorkeeper looking into the room?”
“Some person just looked in—person they appear to object to,” said the strange man, giving keen attention to what was going forward. “Are these your own children, ma'am?”
Grandma Padgett rolled up her knitting, and tipped her head slightly back to bring the stranger well under her view.
“This girl and the boy belong to my family,” she replied.
“But whose is the little girl on the lounge?”
“I don't know,” replied Grandma Padgett, somewhat despondently. “I wish I did. She's a child that seems to be lost from her friends.”
“But you can't take her away and give her to the show people again,” exclaimed aunt Corinne, turning on this stranger with nervous defiance. “She's more ours than she is yours, and that ugly man scared her so she couldn't do anything but cry or go to sleep. If brother Tip was here he wouldn't let them have her.”
“That man that just went out, is a showman,” explained Robert Day, relying somewhat on the stranger for aid and re-inforcement. “She was in the show that he tended door for. They were awful people. Aunt Krin and I slipped her off with us.”
“That's kidnapping. Stealing, you know,” commented the stranger.
“They'd stolen her,” declared Bobaday.