“Tut, tut!” murmured the woman. “He’s the most sensible of the two of you, I declare.”
But she did not urge Carolyn May to eat. There was a platter of broken meat and bread for the dog, and Prince ate with apparent thankfulness.
“But you wouldn’t gobble that down so, if you knew what was going to happen to us, you poor dear,” Carolyn May whispered.
Later she took Prince around the premises on his leash. She led him along the edge of the brook. The Stagg place bordered on both sides of the stream, and on the farther side were hayfields. Uncle Joe did not till any land save the garden in which the unhappy Prince had done such damage.
The little girl found, she believed, what must be the deepest hole in the brook. It was not far beyond the great, widely spreading tree on the knoll where she loved to sit. The water was brown and cloudy in this pool, and a trout jumped there and left a wake of bubbles behind him where he dived again with the luckless fly he had snapped out of the air.
“I wonder if that trout will stay there if you are drownd-ed right where he lives?” Carolyn May asked of Prince.
Prince wagged his abbreviated tail and yawned. Really, he seemed very little impressed by the tragic fate that overhung him. Perhaps Carolyn May’s feelings would have been less desperate had she been blessed, as Prince was just then, by a full stomach.
Nevertheless, the tragedy was all very real to the child. She saw Aunty Rose sitting in one of her stiffest and most straight-backed chairs on the porch, knitting. Carolyn May would not go near her, for she knew she would burst out crying at the first kind word.
She had learned to love Aunty Rose. The old lady always waited for Carolyn May to say her prayers now, when bedtime came. And the child had a well-grounded suspicion that before Mrs. Kennedy sought her own bed she crept into Carolyn May’s room and kissed her softly and saw that she was tucked in.
She felt that she would be sorry to leave Aunty Rose. And there was the woman whose husband kept the store on the other corner from the Stagg house. She had given Carolyn May a stick of candy one day.