One pair of eyes, however, looked on, even more eagerly than before. One young girl--she with the short curly hair who hadn't seen the country for six years and more--caught her breath, convulsively, at the word.
"I wish I dar'st! I've a great mind!" whispered she to her tidy companion.
While she hesitated, a slatternly young woman, a few seats farther forward, moved, with a "don't care" sort of look, to answer the summons.
"Oh, dear!" sighed the first. "I'd ought to a done it!"
"I don't think she would take a young girl like you," replied her friend.
"That's the way it always is!" exclaimed the disappointed voice, in forgetfulness and excitement uttering itself aloud. "Plenty of good times going, but they all go right by. I ain't never in any of 'em!"
"Glory McWhirk!" chided the directress, "be quiet! Remember the rules, or leave the room."
"Call that red-headed girl to me," said Miss Henderson, turning square round from the dirty figure that was presenting itself before her, and addressing the desk. "She looks clean and bright," she added, aside, to Faith, as Glory timidly approached. "And poor. And longing for a chance. I'll have her."
A girl with a bonnet full of braids and roses, and a look of general knowingness, started up close at Miss Henderson's side, and interposed.
"Did you say twenty miles, mum? How often could I come to town?"
"You haven't been asked to go _out_ of town, that I know of," replied Miss Henderson, frigidly, abashing the office _habitué_, who had not been used to find her catechism cut so summarily short, and moving aside to speak with Glory.
"I didn't mean to speak out so, mum. It was only what I mostly thinks. That there's always lots of good times in the world, only I ain't never in 'em."
"And you thought it would be good times, did you, to go off twenty miles into the country, to live alone with an old woman like me?"
Miss Henderson's tone softened kindly to the rough, uncouth girl, and encouraged her to confidence.
"Well, you see, mum, I should like to go where things is green and pleasant. I lived in the country once--ever so long ago--when I was a little girl."
Miss Henderson could not help a smile that was half amused, and wholly pitiful, as she looked in the face of this creature of fourteen, so strange and earnest, with its outline of fuzzy, cropped hair, and heard her talk of "ever so long ago."