“Only, I s’pose, they wouldn’t have wanted you, my dear. And you are the very best friend I’ve got, Prince. You are! you are! You wouldn’t go off and get married, would you?
“And I want ’em to be happy, too. Of course I do! But—but I didn’t know it was goin’ to be like this. I—I wish I was back in our old home in New York. Don’t you wish so, Princey?
“There we had things that were our very own. Even if my mamma and papa aren’t there, it would be nice, I think. And Mr. and Mrs. Price would be kind to us—and Edna. And there’s the janitor’s boy—he was a real nice boy. And all the little girls we knew at school there.
“Oh!” cried Carolyn May, suddenly jumping up and dashing away her tears, “I would just love to go back there. And we could, Princey! I’ve got more’n ten dollars in my bank, for Uncle Joe gave me a ten-dollar gold piece at Christmas. That’s more’n enough to take us back home. Oh, it is! it is!”
The child’s excitement thrilled her through and through. Her eyes brightened and the flush came into her cheeks. She knew, through Chet Gormley, that Mr. Stagg had never done anything with the furniture in the flat. Her home—just as it had been when her mother and father were alive—was back there in New York City. She had been happy at The Corners in a way. But it was not the happiness she had known in her old home.
And now she believed that she saw great changes coming. Uncle Joe and Miss Amanda would be just as Aunty Rose had hinted—so deeply engaged with each other that they would have no time or thought for a sunny-haired and blue-eyed little girl who had brought, all unknown to herself, a new creed into the lives of many of the adults of The Corners.
Carolyn May was not a sly child, but she was a secretive one. There is a difference. She had many thoughts in her little head that her adult friends did not suspect. She studied things out for herself. Being a child, her conclusions were not always wise ones.
She felt that she might be a stumbling-block to the complete happiness of Uncle Joe and Amanda Parlow. They might have to set aside their own desires because of her. She felt vaguely that this must not be.
“I can go home,” she repeated over and over to herself.
“Home” was still in the New York City apartment house where she had lived so happily before that day when her father and mother had gone aboard the ill-fated Dunraven.