“Oh, Joe! Oh, Joe! How could you?” she moaned, rocking herself to and fro. “How could you?”
CHAPTER XIII—BREAKING THROUGH
Carolyn May always spent a part of each Saturday afternoon, unless it rained, in the neglected graveyard behind The Corners church. One might think that this was not a very cheerful spot for a little girl—and a dog—at any time. But the little girl, as a usual thing, carried her own cheerfulness with her.
Even on this day, when Chet Gormley’s ill-advised gossip had so smitten her with secret grief, she would not let the burden she carried utterly quench her spirit. She was brave.
She did not tell Aunty Rose where she was going, although she reported her return from Sunrise Cove to that good woman and explained where she had stopped for dinner.
“Well, well, with Jedidiah Parlow and his daughter! I would not tell Joseph Stagg about it, if I were you, child,” was Aunty Rose’s comment.
Carolyn May had no intention of speaking to Uncle Joe about her visit to the carpenter and Miss Amanda; yet, having sounded the hardware dealer on that point before, she did not think he would really mind if she called on the “pretty lady.”
There was something else—something very much more important—that she desired to talk to Uncle Joe about, and she was thinking very hard over it as she trimmed the long grass about the three little baby graves in the Kennedy lot and about the longer grave of Aunty Rose’s husband.
“Now I have caught the culprit,” said a voice behind her, and Carolyn May looked up to see the Reverend Afton Driggs smiling down at her.
“It had begun to puzzle me why this little patch of our old graveyard looked so much better than the rest. I might have known you had something to do with it,” went on the minister.