“Halverson can’t get up so very fast,” she explained, and seated herself on the top step holding one little arm as if it were circling some one.
Pelleas and I looked at each other in almost shy consternation. We are ourselves ready with the maddest fancies and we readily accept the imaginings of others—and even, if we are sufficiently fond of them, their facts. But we are not accustomed to being distanced on our own ground.
“Your—little sister?” said I, as naturally as I was able.
“Yes,” she assented with simplicity, “Halverson. She goes with me nearly all over. But she don’t like to come to see peoples, very well.”
At this I was seized with a kind of breathlessness and trembling. It is always wonderful to be received into the secrets of a child’s play; but here, we instinctively felt, was something which Margaret did not regard as play.
“How old is she?” Pelleas asked. (Ah, I thought, even in my excitement and interest, suppose I had been married to a man who would have felt it necessary to say, “But, my dear little girl, there is no one there!”)
“She is just as old as I am,” explained Margaret; “we was borned together. Sometimes I’ve thought,” she added shyly, “wouldn’t it ’a’ been funny if I’d been made the one you couldn’t see and Halverson’d been me?”
Yes, we agreed, finding a certain relief in the smile that she expected; that would have been funny.
“Then,” she continued, “it’d ’a’ been Halverson that’d had to be dressed up and have her face washed an’ a cool bath, ’stead o’ me. I often rish it could be the other way round.”
She looked pensively down and her slim little hand might have been straying over somebody’s curls.