'Oh, mother! mother!—how could you? And I laughed at him—I did—I did!' she cried, wringing her hands. 'And he looked so tired! And on the way home Amélie mimicked him—and his voice—and his queer ways; and I laughed. Oh, what a beast I was! Oh, mother, and I told you his name, and you never—never—said a word!'
The child flung herself on the floor, her feet tucked under her, her hands clasped round her knees, swaying backwards and forwards in a tempest of excited feeling, hardly knowing what she said.
Phoebe looked at her, bewildered; then she removed her hand, and Carrie saw the telegram. She threw herself on it, read the address, gulping, then the words:
'A messenger!' She understood that no more than her mother. It meant a letter, perhaps? But she fastened on 'immediately'—'welcome.'
And presently—all in a moment—she leapt to her feet, and began to dance and spring about the room. And as Phoebe watched her, startled and open-mouthed, wondering if this was all the reproach that Carrie was ever going to make her, the flushed and joyous creature came and flung her arms round Phoebe's neck, so that the fair hair and the brown were all in a confusion together, and the child's cheek was on her mother's.
'Mummy!—and I was only five, and you weren't so very old—only seven years older than I am now—and you thought father was tired of you—and you went off to Canada right away. My!—it was plucky of you—I will say that for you. And if you hadn't gone, I should never have seen George. But—oh, mummy, mummy!'—this between laughing and crying—'I do guess you were just a little fool! I guess you were!'
Miss Anna sat downstairs listening to the murmur of those hurrying voices above her in Phoebe's room. She was darning a tablecloth, with the Manchester paper beside her; and she sat peculiarly erect, a little stern and pinched,—breathing protest.
It was extraordinary how Carrie had taken it. These were your Canadian ways, she supposed. No horror of anything—no shyness. Looking a thing straight in the face, at a moment's notice—with a kind of humorous common sense—refusing altogether to cry over spilt milk, even such spilt milk as this—in a hurry, simply, to clear it up! A mere metaphorical refusal to cry, this—for, after all, there had been tears. But the immediate rebound, the determination to be cheerful, though the heavens fell, had been so amazing! The child had begun to laugh before her tears were dry—letting loose a flood of sharp, shrewd questions on her companion; wondering, with sparkling looks, how 'George' would take it; and quite refusing to provide that fine-drawn or shrinking sentiment, that 'moral sense,' in short, with which, as it seemed to the elder woman, half-hours of this quality in life should be decently accompanied. Little heathen! Miss Anna thought grimly of all the precautions she had taken to spare the young lady's feelings—of her own emotions—her sense of a solemn and epoch-making experience. She might have saved her pains!
But at this point the door upstairs opened, and the 'little heathen' descended presently to the parlour, bringing the telegram. She came in shyly, and it might perhaps have been seen that she was conscious of her disgrace with Miss Anna. But she said nothing; she merely held out the piece of pink paper; and Miss Anna, surprised out of her own 'moral sense,' fell upon it, hastily adjusting her spectacles to a large and characteristic nose.
She read it frowning. A messenger! What on earth did they want with such a person? Just like John!—putting the disagreeables on other people. She said to herself that one saw where the child's levity came from.