and oh, I’m so glad, ’cause they was good to me—so good! First Mis’ Whalen took in Patty and the twins when the rent man dumped ’em out on the sidewalk, and she gave ’em a whole corner of her kitchen. And then when I runned away from the bag-pasting, Patty and the twins took me in. And now I can pay ’em back for it all—I can pay ’em back. I’m so glad!”
Mrs. Kendall fell back limply against the garden seat. Twice she opened her lips—and closed them again. Her face flushed, then paled, and her hands grew cold in her lap.
This dancing little maid with the sunlit hair and the astounding proposition to adopt into their home two whole families from the slums of New York, was Margaret, her own little Margaret, lost so long ago, and now so miraculously restored to her. As if she could refuse any request, however wild, from Margaret! But this—!
“But, sweetheart, perhaps they—they wouldn’t want to go away forever and leave their home,” she remonstrated at last, feebly.
The child frowned, her finger to her lips.
“Well, anyhow, we can ask them,” she declared, after a minute, her face clearing.
“Suppose we—we make it a visit, first,” suggested Mrs. Kendall, feverishly. “By and by, after I’ve had you all to myself for a little while, you shall ask them to—to visit you.”
“O bully!” agreed Margaret in swift delight. “That will be nicest; won’t it? Then they can see how they like it—but there! they’ll like it all right. They couldn’t help it.”
“And how—how many are there?” questioned Mrs. Kendall, moistening her dry lips, and feeling profoundly thankful for even this respite from the proposed wholesale adoption.
“Why, let’s see.” Margaret held up her fingers and checked off her prospective guests. “There’s Patty, she’s the oldest, and Arabella and Clarabella—they’re the twins an’ they’re my age, you know—that’s the Murphys. And then there’s all the Whalens: Tom, Peter, Mary, Jamie, and—oh, I dunno, six or eight, maybe, with Mis’ Whalen and her husband. But, after all, it don’t make so very much diff’rence just how many there are; does it?” she added, with a happy little skip and jump, “’cause there’s heaps of room here for any ‘mount of ’em. And I never can remember just how many there are without forgettin’ some of ’em. You—you don’t mind if I don’t name ’em all—now?” And she gazed earnestly into her mother’s face.
“No, dear, no,” assured Mrs. Kendall, hurriedly. “You—you have named quite enough. And now we’ll go down to the brook. We haven’t seen half of Five Oaks yet.” And once more she tried to make the joyous present drive from her daughter’s thoughts the grievous past.
CHAPTER II
It was not long before all Houghtonsville knew the story, and there was not a man, woman, or child in the town that did not take the liveliest interest in the little maid at Five Oaks who had passed through so amazing an experience. To be lost at five years of age in a great city, to be snatched from wealth, happiness, and a loving mother’s arms, only to be thrust instantly into poverty, misery, and loneliness; and then to be, after four long years, suddenly returned—no wonder Houghtonsville held its breath and questioned if it all indeed were true.
Bit by bit the little girl’s history was related in every house in town; and many a woman—and some men—wept over the tale of how the little fingers had sewed on buttons in the attic sweat shop, and pasted bags in the ill-smelling cellar. The story of the coöperative housekeeping establishment in one corner of the basement kitchen, where she, together with Patty and the twins, “divvied up” the day’s “haul,”—that, too, came in for its share of exclamatory adjectives, as did the account of how she was finally discovered through her finding her own name over the little cot-bed at Mont-Lawn—the little bed that Mrs. Kendall had endowed in the name of her lost daughter, in the children’s vacation home for the poor little waifs from the city.
“An’ ter think of her findin’ her own baby jest by givin’ some other woman’s baby a bit of joy!” cried Mrs. Merton of the old red farmhouse, when the story was told to her. “But, there! ain’t that what she’s always doin’ for folks—somethin’ ter make ’em happy? Didn’t she bring my own child, Sadie, an’ the boy, Bobby, back from the city, and ain’t Sadie gettin’ well an’ strong on the farm here? And it’s a comfort ter me, too, when I remember ’twas Bobby who first found the little Margaret cryin’ in the streets there in New York, an’ took her home ter my Sadie. ‘Twa’n’t much Sadie could do for the poor little lamb, but she did what she could till old Sullivan got his claws on her and kept her shut up out o’ sight. But there! what’s past is past, and there ain’t no use frettin’ over it. She’s home now, in her own mother’s arms, and I’m thinkin’ it’s the whole town that’s rejoicin’!”
And the whole town did rejoice—and many and various were the ways the townspeople took to show it. The Houghtonsville brass band marched in full uniform to Five Oaks one evening and gave a serenade with red fire and rockets, much to Mrs. Kendall’s embarrassment and Margaret’s delight. The Ladies’ Aid Society gave a tea with Mrs. Kendall and Margaret as a kind of pivot around which the entire affair revolved—this time to the embarrassment of both Mrs. Kendall and her daughter. The minister of the Methodist church appointed a day of prayer and thanksgiving in commemoration of the homecoming of the wanderer; and the town poet published in the Houghtonsville Banner a forty-eight-line poem on “The Lost and Found.”
Nor was this all. To Mrs. Kendall it seemed that almost every man, woman, and child in the place came to her door with inquiries and congratulations, together with all sorts of offerings, from flowers and frosted cakes to tidies and worked bedspreads. She was not ungrateful, certainly, but she was overwhelmed.
Not only the cakes and the tidies, however, gave Mrs. Kendall food for thought during those first few days after Margaret’s return. From the very nature of the case it was, of necessity, a period of adjustment; and to Mrs. Kendall’s consternation there was every indication of friction, if not disaster.
For four years now her young daughter had been away from her tender care and influence; and for only one of those four years—the last—had she come under the influence of any sort of refinement or culture, and then under only such as a city missionary and an overworked schoolteacher could afford, supplemented by the two trips to Mont-Lawn. To be sure, behind it all had been Margaret’s careful training for the first five years of her life, and it was because of this training that she had so quickly yielded to what good influences she had known in the last year. The Alley, however, was not Five Oaks; and the standards of one did not measure to those of the other. It was not easy for “Mag of the Alley” to become at once Margaret Kendall, the dainty little daughter of a well-bred, fastidious mother.
To the doctor—the doctor who had gone to New York and brought Margaret home, and who knew her as she was—Mrs. Kendall went for advice.
“What shall I do?” she asked anxiously. “A hundred times a day the dear child’s speech, movements, and actions are not what I like them to be. And yet—if I correct each one, ’twill be a continual ‘don’t’ all day. Why, doctor, the child will—hate me!”
“As if any one could do that!” smiled the doctor; and at the look in his eyes Mrs. Kendall dropped her own—the happiness that had come to her with this man’s love was very new; she had scarcely yet looked it squarely
