“Seems to me, Uncle Joe,” concluded Carolyn May, giving a happy little jump on his lap, “that if you let your mind sort o’ run on—on something besides hardware once in a while, maybe you would have time to show me how much you loved me. Then I wouldn’t have to ask.”
The man looked at her somewhat blankly. Then he turned his head, ran his hand through his bushy hair, and gazed away meditatively.
The little girl had awakened his heart. And that heart was very, very sore.
CHAPTER XIV—A FIND IN THE DRIFTS
Before the week was over, winter had come to Sunrise Cove and The Corners in earnest. Snow fell and drifted, until there was scarcely anything to be seen one morning when Carolyn May awoke and looked out of her bedroom windows but a white, fleecy mantle.
This was more snow than the little girl had ever seen in New York. She came down to breakfast very much excited.
“What are we going to do about all this snow?” she asked. “Why! there isn’t any janitor to shovel off the walk, and no street cleaners to clear the crosswalks! How am I ever going to get to school?”
“I reckon you’ll get to school, all right, if the men get through with the ploughs before half-past eight. And if Miss Minnie gets here,” chuckled Uncle Joe.
He went out and fed the fowls for Aunty Rose and did the other chores. But when he started for the store, promising to send Chet Gormley up to dig the paths, he had to wade through drifts higher than the top rail of the fences.
“Don’t—don’t they shovel up the snow and put it in carts and carry it all away?” asked Carolyn May of Aunty Rose.