I talked to the child, partly because my overfull sixteen-year-old heart must find an outlet, partly because I wished to soften her heart towards Cyrus and make her feel, so far as a child could, the sacrifice he was making.
“He thinks it is his duty to take care of you and Dave,” I said bluntly. In my exalted mood of pity for Cyrus I felt as if she ought to know it.
“Take care of us? Mercy! That would be worse than having Loveday. And how ridiculous! Why I darned one of his stockings last week, myself. Loveday showed me. I wanted to, because you put a china egg into the toe.”
I sighed impatiently. Were all children as stupid as this? Had I been mistaken in thinking her intelligent?
But she was silent as we walked up the minister’s garden path and in the shadow of the tall old elm trees I saw the color come and go upon her sensitive little face.
Dave had caught sight of the Barstow boys and gone in pursuit of them.
The old minister had just come out upon the porch to rest in the shade, but he didn’t look in the least as if we disturbed him. He took off his straw hat to me as if I were sixty instead of sixteen, and he kissed Estelle’s sticky little hand.
But when I had told him my trouble, plunging headlong into the subject, as was my habit, for the first time in my life Parson Grover disappointed me.
“Cyrus has talked the matter over with me, my dear, and I think the boy is quite right,” he said. “When God has filled our hands with duties he doesn’t mean us to go in search of others.”
Here was Loveday’s doctrine again! “People should do their duty where the Lord had sot ’em!”