“The child is happier with you, and I want her to be happy,” she said, with perfect frankness. “She’s a little afraid of me for some reason, and though it hurts my vanity, I don’t want to hurry her confidence. I believe I shall win it in time.”
“Of course, you will,” said Arctura, stoutly. “I can’t quite make her out sometimes. She’ll seem real gay for a few minutes and then sober down all of a sudden, as if she remembered something. She’s just as anxious to please you as ever a child could be. Do you suppose that Manser woman could have scared her any way? Told her you were set on having her act any particular way, or anything?”
Miss Pomeroy’s life had been singularly apart from the current of village gossip; she stared blankly at this suggestion and then shook her head.
“It wouldn’t be possible,” she said, decidedly. “Mrs. Manser never spoke to me until I waylaid her after church that Sunday, three or four weeks ago. And there is nobody to tell her anything of me or my ways of living. She simply knows that I took a fancy to Mary, and—since yesterday—that I wish to adopt her.”
“M-m,” said Arctura, softly, as Miss Pomeroy turned away. “I shouldn’t want to be too sure what folks know and what they don’t, in any place where there’s a post-office, two meat-men, and a baker’s cart.”
“I’ve written my letter to go with the candy to-morrow morning,” said Polly, as she basted a strip of turkey-red binding around a square of ticking after Miss Green’s instructions. “It took me ’most an hour and a half by the big clock, and I made four blots and had to look in the dictionary three times, and now I expect it’s just full of mistakes. I carried it to Miss Pomeroy, but she said she wanted Aunty Peebles to have the first reading of it, and she helped me seal it with a great splotch of red sealing-wax, and marked it with her big stamp.”
“Won’t it mix ’em all up to see a ‘P’ on the letter?” inquired Arctura. “Why, no; what am I thinking of? ‘P’ stands for Prentiss just as well as Pomeroy.”
“Yes, and for—for other names, too,” said Polly, remembering just in time. “Polly Perkins—that’s in your song—it stands for both of her names.”
“To be sure it does,” said Arctura. Then the chairs rocked in silence for a few minutes. Arctura stole a glance at the face so near hers. The little mouth was shut firmly, but there was a downward droop at the corners, and it certainly appeared to Arctura that something glistened in the long lashes that hid the great brown eyes.
“H-m—it’s a kind of a dull day for little folks and big folks, too,” she said, poking vigorously at the ashes in the grate with her back to Polly. “I don’t know as there’ll ever come a better time for me to tell you about the Square and me when I was your age.”