The Fairy Foundling had removed her twenty-cent hat of brown straw and shaken free her dusky, ribbonless tresses. She wore a drab Orphanage frock which only reached her knees, her stockings were thick and shapeless and her shoes had emphatically been selected for service and not for style. Yet the child in either sackcloth or satin would have divulged equal quality. There was no cheap sniggering bashfulness, no clodhopper shyness in her demeanor. But there was reserve and painful anxiety not unmixed with a little dread. Her cameo features were pale. Her delicate rosebud lips disclosed teeth like chips of porcelain. Her deep brown eyes—almost black—held that same queer calmness, but those eyes could easily turn starry, as Mrs. Theddon discovered in the next few moments.
“Makes me think she’s always on the point of wanting to weep with happiness, yet smilin’ through tears that don’t quite come,” was old Murfins’ way of describing those eyes to Stebbins, the second man. To which sentiments Stebbins subscribed avidly,—though with picturesque variations.
Six feet from Mrs. Theddon the little girl halted.
“So you’ve come,” was all that perturbed woman could call up at the moment. She meant it kindly yet she realized it was the wrong thing—not at all cordial and maternal. And she greatly longed to be cordial and maternal and set riotously free the tenderness aching in her soul for expression.
“Yes’m,” returned the Fairy Foundling, with a tight swallow,”—I’ve come.”
“And you’d like to be my little girl?”
“I’d like to be anybody’s little girl that” (swallow) “wanted me.”
Mrs. Theddon sank sideways upon her chair. She could feel every throb of her heart, count its ragged beatings.
Suddenly, as the wistful figure stood there, never so parentless, her frailness and smallness accentuated by the great room above her, the rich woman held out her arms.
“Baby!” she cried brokenly. “Come!”