“Oh, she slapped me, told me I was nothing but an ugly, red-headed little object of charity, and not to go imagining any more nonsense.”
Mrs. Malloy bit her lip to keep back the disparaging words which longed for utterance. Instead, she stroked the hand she held, and Meg continued:
“Since then I have played my little games by myself. Sometimes I go up to the attic, where I have a trunk containing mother’s things. I put on her dress and apron, and take a piece of crochet work in my hands,—the one she was making when she was taken sick,—and then I pretend that I am she, and that I am there, too,—you understand?”
Mrs. Malloy nodded. “And then I talk as I know she would talk to me if she were here. I give myself lectures for my frivolity, and good advice,—and,—and,—oh, I say the tender little things that I know she would say, and that no one ever does——” She stopped, and began to sob quietly.
Mrs. Malloy drew her up beside her, so that the little red head rested on her shoulder. There were unshed tears in her eyes, which had looked out bravely and hopefully upon a world that had little enough to offer her, and she felt, in this moment, that a very strong bond was between this girl, almost a stranger, and herself.
[CHAPTER IV.]
“Ope the sacred source of sympathetic tears.”
Meg was leaning back in delicious idleness on the cool, shaded porch of her aunt’s house, with her hands loosely clasped above her head, and her eyes dreamily fixed on the treetops.
Robert Malloy was reading aloud from a book of verse. His voice, rising and falling musically, harmonized with the summer sounds, the hum of the insects, and chirping of the birds that came fearlessly close, to bathe in the whirling spray of the garden hose.
After he had read a while he closed the book, and said, “Tell me a story.”