Dil had a strange, homesick yearning to-day. She longed so to see the boys. Her eyes overflowed with tears as she thought of them and their warm, vital love. She seemed almost to have lost Bess. Could she see her again at Cent’l Park she wondered? She would ask Patsey to take her there as soon as she went home.
A great hay wagon had come and taken a load of the children down to the meadows. Three were in disgrace for being naughty, and had to spend an hour sitting on the stoop. Some were reading. The German girl was crocheting.
Dil sat out under the old branching apple-tree, whose hard red apples would be delightful along in the autumn. She was counting up the days. To-night they would be half gone. Would they let her go on Saturday she wondered? She looked at her poor little hands—they hadn’t grown any fat.
“Who is that little girl? and why does she keep apart from the others?” asked Miss Deering.
“I don’t know. She seems strange and hard to get on with. But she looks so weakly that even sitting still may do her good. Go and see what you can make of her, Miss Virginia.”
Miss Deering had several roses in her hand. She sauntered slowly down to Dil, and dropped the roses in her lap on the thin white hands.
“Oh, thank you!” Dil exclaimed gravely. She did not pick them up with the enthusiasm Miss Deering expected.
“Don’t you care for flowers?” Miss Deering seated herself beside the quiet child, and studied the face turned a little from her.
“Yes, I like thim so much,” glancing at them with a curiously absent air. Her manner was so formal and old-fashioned, and she roused a sense of elusiveness that puzzled the young lady.
“I think I must have seen you before. I can’t just remember—”
Dil raised her soft brown eyes, lustrous still with the tears of longing that were in them a moment ago. The short curved upper lip, the tumbled hair, the gravely wondering expression—how curiously familiar it seemed.
“I hope you are happy here?” she said gently.
“I like it better home,” Dil returned, but with no emphasis of ungraciousness. “I’m used to the boys, ’n’ they’re so good to me. But they wanted me to come an’ get well. I wasn’t reel sick only—Patsey don’t like me to look like a skiliton, he says. Everybody here’s so nice.”