“Thank you very much. I'm sorry that I must leave Putney at such a time. But I leave him with Mr. Peck, who's promised to be with him. I thought you'd like to know.”
“Yes, I do; it's very kind of you—very kind indeed.”
“Thank you,” said the doctor. It was not the phrase exactly, but it served the purpose of the cordial interest in which they parted as well as another.
XXI.
During the days that Mr. Peck had consented to leave Idella with her Annie took the whole charge of the child, and grew into an intimacy with her that was very sweet. It was not necessary to this that Idella should be always tractable and docile, which she was not, but only that she should be affectionate and dependent; Annie found that she even liked her to be a little baddish; it gave her something to forgive; and she experienced a perverse pleasure in discovering that the child of a man so self-forgetful as Mr. Peck was rather more covetous than most children. It also amused her that when some of Idella's shabby playmates from Over the Track casually found their way to the woods past Annie's house, and tried to tempt Idella to go with them, the child disowned them, and ran into the house from them; so soon was she alienated from her former life by her present social advantages. She apparently distinguished between Annie and the Boltons, or if not quite this, she showed a distinct preference for her company, and for her part of the house. She hung about Annie with a flattering curiosity and interest in all she did. She lost every trace of shyness with her, but developed an intense admiration for her in every way—for her dresses, her rings, her laces, for the elegancies that marked her a gentlewoman. She pronounced them prettier than Mrs. Warner's things, and the house prettier and larger.
“Should you like to live with me?” Annie asked.
The child seemed to reflect. Then she said, with the indirection of her age and sex, pushing against Annie's knee, “I don't know what your name is.”
“Have you never heard my name? It's Annie. How do you like it?”
“It's—it's too short,” said the child, from her readiness always to answer something that charmed Annie.