He laid her gently on a couch, and called his housekeeper, a white-haired, kindly old woman, with cheeks like the apples that crowded his orchards in October.
“Monarch knocked this little girl down, and she is senseless with the fall. Will you do your best for her, Mary? She is one of the Home children,” he said to the old dame, and he did not add a word about the matches.
The housekeeper’s simple remedies soon recalled Gemma back to her senses, and she opened her great, frightened, humid eyes to the light of the lamp-lit room.
“I zolfini, I zolfini!” she murmured, thinking of her matches and vaguely fancying that she was in the midst of flames. All her English had gone clean away from her.
“It is that foreign child, master,” said the housekeeper,—“the one that has been roaming the country ever since Candlemas; I caught her little brother at the hen house at Easter-time, and spanked him. They were both of them sentenced, weren’t they, in town this morning, and the old grandfather too?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Carey, curtly, “she has run away, that is evident. Suppose you go and get some little room ready for her, for she will not be able to go back to-night. She is all right now, I fancy, though she is not yet fairly awake.”
“One of the attics, master? Shall she sleep with Hannah?—not as Hannah will stomach it, a little waif and stray out of prison——”
“No, no; get her a nice little room ready anywhere you like, but one that is comfortable. She is a very forlorn little maid: we must be good to her, Mary.”
“Her little brother was at the hen-house, and I spanked him——”
“She is not her brother,” said Philip Carey, impatiently. “Leave me with her a little.”