“Oh! Can I have some?” she gasped.
“All you want,” said Mr. Parlow, and perhaps that funny noise he made in his throat was as near to a laugh as he ever got.
When Tim’s old hack crawled along the road from town, with Aunty Rose sitting inside, enthroned amidst a multitude of bundles, Carolyn May was bedecked with a veritable wig of long, crisp curls, each carefully thrust under the brim of her hat. And when she shook the curls, Prince barked at her.
“Well, child, you certainly have made a mess of yourself,” said the housekeeper. “Has she been annoying you, Jedidiah Parlow?”
“She’s the only Stagg that ain’t annoyed me since her mother went away,” said the carpenter gruffly.
Aunty Rose looked at him levelly. “I wonder,” she said. “But, you see, she isn’t wholly a Stagg.”
This, of course, did not explain matters to Carolyn May in the least. Nor did what Aunty Rose said to her on the way home in the hot, stuffy hack help the little girl to understand the trouble between her uncle and Mr. Parlow.
“Better not let Joseph Stagg see you so friendly with Jedidiah Parlow. Let sleeping dogs lie,” Mrs. Kennedy observed.
CHAPTER VII—A TRAGIC SITUATION
Such was the introduction of Carolyn May to The Corners. It was not a very exciting life she had entered into, but the following two or three weeks were very full.