Thurley was in the doorway. “I beg you will do nothing of the sort,” she said. “You have loaded me now with the treasures of Arabia. I beg you will not! I want to earn things myself—as I did at the Corners—you must let me. Being supported takes something out of me, I don’t know what,” she clasped her hands in her rapt fashion. “I’d rather live in a tiny room, or a box-car, you know, and have very skimpy meals and old-style clothes and study hard and forget the meals and clothes and then earn the beautiful, lovely things. That would make me feel right, ’way inside.”
Miss Clergy’s withered face lost some of its haunted expression. “Well, my dear, you shall wait then and earn your home, but I am afraid that, if it is quite your own home, you will not want to share it with a funny old per—”
At which Thurley flew across the room and put her fresh cheek against the faded one to promise with the enthusiasm of untried youth that the home she should earn would be but half her home, for the other half would belong to a certain dear person.
Whirling towards the studio, Thurley drew Betsey Pilrig’s letter from her bag. It was the second letter she had had from the Corners, for Betsey Pilrig undertook writing a letter with the same solemn preparation that most people give to making a will. It required several days of deciding “what to say to her” and a battle against natural inertia before she could sit at the red-covered dining-table and force her toil-worn fingers to write in cramped characters unreal-sounding phrases. Besides, Betsey Pilrig had always sealed letters with the firm conviction that maybe they would never get there anyway, letters seemed such queer things to go flying about the country.
Not that Betsey had not thought of Thurley every hour in the day, standing in the doorway of her house and of the Fincherie to picture again the blue-eyed young goddess dancing imperiously up the walk or sitting under gnarled apple trees to shell peas or peel potatoes, singing in glorious tones as she did so.
When Thurley’s letters had come to Betsey, she and Hopeful read them aloud to Ali Baba and the trio sat discussing the fate of their songbird. To their minds the “happening” was still something to be talked of with suspicion. One does not fancy a “ghost” taking a beloved child to the city, never to return, and being responsible, so it had become known, for Dan Birge’s broken heart and his mad engagement to Lorraine.
“She’ll never come back the same,” Ali Baba would insist.
“Abby Clergy will leave her every nickel,” Hopeful would supplement. “Then she’s bound to come back and lord it over Dan Birge.”
“She’ll be a great singer—God love and keep her,” was Betsey’s plea.