“And the worst of it is,” grumbled the hardware dealer, “he never caught the mole. That mongrel really isn’t worth a bag of dornicks to sink him in the brook. But that’s what he’s going to get this very evening when I come home. I won’t stand for him a day longer.”
Carolyn May positively turned pale as she crouched beside the now chained-up Prince, both arms about his rough neck. He licked her cheek. Fortunately, he could not understand everything that was said to him, therefore the pronouncement of this terrible sentence did not agitate him an atom.
But his little mistress held to him tightly, dry sobs shaking her slight form. Uncle Joe went in to dinner with little appreciation of the horror and despair that filled the soul of Hannah’s Car’lyn, out under the tree in the back yard.
CHAPTER VIII—MR. STAGG IS JUDGED
First, of course, Carolyn May thought she would run away—she and Prince. She could not eat any dinner, although Aunty Rose called her twice and she did feel a little faint, for she possessed a hearty appetite. But the child knew that the very first mouthful she tried to swallow would choke her—and then she would cry.
Perhaps Aunty Rose understood this, for she did not trouble the little girl again. Carolyn May sat for a long time under the tree beside the sleeping dog and thought how different this life at The Corners was from that she had lived with her father and mother in the city home.
If only that big ship, the Dunraven, had not sailed away with her papa and her mamma!
Carolyn May had been very brave on that occasion. She had gone ashore with Mrs. Price and Edna after her mother’s last clinging embrace and her father’s husky “Good-bye, daughter,” with scarcely a tear. She had watched the huge vessel sweep off from the dock and out into the stream, carried by the outgoing tide and helped by a fussy tug, which latter she had thought preposterously small to be of any real service to such a huge craft as the Dunraven.
They had run to the very end of the pier, too; so as to see the last of the outgoing ship. Of course, the faces of her father and mother were lost to her vision in the crowd of other passengers, but her mother had waved her pink veil, as agreed, and Carolyn May could see that for a long while.
Of course, she had been brave! Mamma would return in a few weeks, and then, after a time, papa would likewise come back—and, oh! so rosy and stout! No more cough, no longer a feeble step, no longer breathless after he had climbed the two flights to their apartment.