“And I guess you’d have the training of this one, mother; and there’s plenty of room in the lot opposite that’s for sale to build a nice little house. They’d start a sight better off than we did.”
“But we were very happy, Joe, weren’t we?”
“That we were, and that we are, Sally,” said Armstrong. “Come on out in the garden with your beau; we ain’t going to let the young folks do all the courting.”
Mysie and Henriette saw the couple walking in the garden, the husband’s arm around his wife’s waist, and the soft-hearted sister sighed.
“Oh, sister, don’t you kinder wish you hadn’t done it?” she whispered. “They didn’t mean any harm.”
“Harm? No. I dare say that young carpenter would be willing to marry Pauline Beaumont!” cried Henriette, bitterly.
Mysie shook her gray head, her loose mouth working, while she winked away a tear. “I don’t care, I don’t care”—thus did she inwardly moan out a spasm of dire resolution—“I’m just going to tell Pauline!”
Perhaps what she told set the cloud on the girl’s pretty face; and perhaps that was why she looked eagerly over the Armstrong fence every night; and the cloud lifted at the sound of Mrs. Armstrong’s mellow voice hailing her from any part of the house or yard.
But one night, instead of the usual cheerful stir about the house, she found the Swede girl alone in the kitchen, weeping over the potatoes. To Pauline’s inquiries she returned a burst of woe. “They all tooken to chail—all!” she wailed. “I don’t know what to do if I get supper. The mans come, the police mans, and tooken them all away. I hela verlden! who ever know such a country? Such nice peoples sent to chail for play on the organ—their own organ! They say they not play right, but I think to send to chail for not play right on the organ that sha’n’t be right!”
Pauline could make nothing more out of her; but the man on the corner looked in at one particularly dolorous burst of sobs over poor Tim and poor Petey and tendered his version: “They’ve gone, sure enough, miss. Your sisters have had them arrested for keeping and committing a nuisance. Now, I ain’t stuck on their organ-playing, as a general rule, myself, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a nuisance. But the Fullers ain’t on the best of terms; old Fuller is a crank, and there’s politics between him and Armstrong and the Delaneys, who have just moved into the neighborhood, mother and daughter—very musical folks, they say, and nervous; they have joined in with your sister—”