By this first week in September the little girl was quite settled in her new home at The Corners. Prince was still a doubtful addition to the family, both Uncle Joe and Aunty Rose plainly having misgivings about him. But in regard to the little girl herself, the hardware merchant and the housekeeper were of one opinion, even though they did not admit it to each other.
Aunty Rose remained, apparently, as austere as ever, while Joseph Stagg was quite as much immersed in business as formerly. Yet there were times, when she and the child were alone, that Mrs. Kennedy unbent, in a greater or less degree. And on the part of Joseph Stagg, he found himself thinking of sunny-haired, blue-eyed “Hannah’s Car’lyn” with increasing frequency.
“Didn’t you ever have any little girls, Aunty Rose?” Carolyn May asked the housekeeper on one of these intimate occasions. “Or little boys? I mean of your very own.”
“Yes,” said Aunty Rose in a matter-of-fact tone. “Three. But only to have them in my arms for a very little while. Each died soon after coming to me. There was something quite wrong with them all, so the doctors said.”
“Oh, my dear! All three of them?” sighed Carolyn May.
“Two girls and a boy. Only one lived to be three months old. They are all buried behind the church yonder. My husband, Frank Kennedy, was not one of us. I married out of Meeting.”
The little girl knew that she meant her husband, long since dead, had not been a member of the congregation of Friends. She leaned against Mrs. Kennedy’s chair and tucked what was meant to be a comforting hand into that of Aunty Rose.
“Now I know something about you,” Carolyn May said softly.
“What is that?” asked the woman, her eyes smiling at the child if her lips did not.
“I know why it is you don’t know just how to cuddle little girls and show ’em how much you love ’em. All little children, I mean—not only me.”