The child was in the garden close by the fence, and glanced up at me with a look which made me stop instantly to gaze at her, while the smile which broke over her face and shone in her blue eyes took me straight through the gate to her side, and before I knew at all what I was doing or why I was doing it, I was talking to her and seeming to myself like one who walks in a dream and sees there things which he has known and seen before.
Surely that smile, which came and went so frequently, and that voice so clear, and sweet, and ringing, were familiar to me, and I said to the child:
“Have you been here before?”
“No, ma’am; I was born in London. I never was in America until now, and yet it’s funny that this place seems like home, and my room is just what I thought it would be. Won’t you walk in, please, and see auntie?” she said, and I followed her into the cottage, where she presented me to the woman there with all the air and grace of one born to the purple.
“Auntie, Mrs. Rogers; this lady is,—I don’t believe I know your name.”
And she turned inquiringly to me.
I told her who I was, and then inspected Mrs. Rogers curiously, and wondered to find her so different from Gertie. She spoke very well and appeared well, but showed at once the class to which she belonged; nor did she make pretensions to anything else than she really was,—a plain, sensible woman, who had come to America to better herself and be near Norah, her cousin.
She wanted work, she said, and asked what the probabilities were of her obtaining employment in Hampstead, either as plain sewer or dressmaker, or both. Of course, I heard about the lost money in the bank, and received the impression that she had seen better days. Everybody who comes from the old country has, but that was natural, and I liked her on the whole, and thought her a woman of great tact and observation, and promised her my plain sewing and my influence if she pleased me.
She was very anxious to send Gertie to school at once, she said, and the next day she sat in my school-room in her dainty dress of blue, with her white-ruffled apron, and her auburn hair rippling all over her finely-shaped, intellectual head. I walked home with her that night, and found Mrs. Rogers in a great deal of trouble about the bedstead and the bureau, which seemed so out of place in the cottage.
“Where did they come from? Did the other tenants use them?” she asked, and as I did not see fit to enlighten her, she finally determined to store them away in the woodshed until Mr. Godfrey came. “I am able to furnish a few rooms decently well myself,” she said; and three days after, when I called on my way from school, Gertie took me to her room and asked me how I liked it.