Читать книгу Girl Alone - Anne Austin - Страница 4

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The long, bare room had never been graced by a picture or a curtain. Its only furniture was twenty narrow iron cots. Four girls were scrubbing the warped, wide-planked floor, three of them pitifully young for the hard work, the baby of them being only six, the oldest nine. The fourth, who directed their labors, rising from her knees sometimes to help one of her small crew, was just turned sixteen, but she looked in her short, skimpy dress of faded blue and white checked gingham, not more than twelve or thirteen.

“Sal-lee,” the six-year-old called out in a coaxing whine, as she sloshed a dirty rag up and down in a pail of soapy water, “play-act for us, won’t you, Sal-lee? ’Tend like you’re a queen and I’m your little girl. I’d be a princess, wouldn’t I, Sal-lee?”

The child sat back on her thin little haunches, one small hand plucking at the skimpy skirt of her own faded blue and white gingham, an exact replica, except for size, of the frocks worn by the three other scrubbers. “I’ll ’tend like I’ve got on a white satin dress, Sal-lee—”

Sally Ford lifted a strand of fine black hair that had escaped from the tight, thick braid that hung down her narrow back, tucked it behind a well-shaped ear, and smiled fondly upon the tiny pleader. It was a miracle-working smile. Before the miracle, that small, pale face had looked like that of a serious little old woman, the brows knotted, the mouth tight in a frown of concentration.

But when she smiled she became a pretty girl. Her blue eyes, that had looked almost as faded as her dress, darkened and gleamed like a pair of perfectly matched sapphires. Delicate, wing-like eyebrows, even blacker than her hair, lost their sullenness, assumed a lovely, provocative arch. Her white cheeks gleamed. Her little pale mouth, unpuckered of its frown, bloomed suddenly, like a tea rose opening. Even, pointed, narrow teeth, to fit the narrowness of her delicate, childish jaw, flashed into that smile, completely destroying the picture of a rather sad little old woman which she might have posed for before.

“All right, Betsy!” Sally cried, jumping to her feet. “But all of you will have to work twice as hard after I’ve play-acted for you, or Stone-Face will skin us alive.”

Her smile was reflected in the three oldish little faces of the children squatting on the floor. The rags with which they had been wiping up surplus water after Sally’s vigorous scrubbing were abandoned, and the three of them, moving in unison like mindless sheep, clustered close to Sally, following her with adoring eyes as she switched a sheet off one of the cots.

“This is my ermine robe,” she declared. “Thelma, run and shut the door.... Now, this is my royal crown,” she added, seizing her long, thick braid of black hair. Her nimble, thin fingers searched for and found three crimped wire hairpins which she secreted in the meshes of the plait. In a trice her small head was crowned with its own magnificent glory, the braid wound coronet-fashion over her ears and low upon her broad, white forehead.

“Say, ‘A royal queen am I,’” six-year-old Betsy shrilled, clasping her hands in ecstasy. “And don’t forget to make up a verse about me, Sal-lee! I’m a princess! I’ve got on white satin and little red shoes, ain’t I, Sal-lee?”

Sally was marching grandly up and down the barrack-like dormitory, holding Betsy’s hand, the train of her “ermine robe” upheld by the two other little girls in faded gingham, and her dramatically deepened voice was chanting “verses” which she had composed on other such occasions and to which she was now adding, when the door was thrown open and a booming voice rang out:

“Sally Ford! What in the world does this mean? On a Saturday morning!”

The two little “pages” dropped the “ermine robe”; the little “princess” shrank closer against the “queen,” and all four, Sally’s voice leading the chorus, chanted in a monotonous sing-song: “Good morning, Mrs. Stone. We hope you are well.” It was the good morning salutation which, at the matron’s orders, invariably greeted her as she made her morning rounds of the state orphanage.

“Good morning, children,” Mrs. Stone, the head matron of the asylum answered severely but automatically. She never spoke except severely, unless it happened that a trustee or a visitor was accompanying her.

“As a punishment for playing at your work you will spend an hour of your Saturday afternoon playtime in the weaving room. And Betsy, if I find your weaving all snarled up like it was last Saturday I’ll lock you in the dark room without any supper. You’re a great big girl, nearly six and a half years old, and you have to learn to work to earn your board and keep. As for you, Sally—well I’m surprised at you! I thought I could depend on you better than this. Sixteen years old and still acting like a child and getting the younger children into trouble. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, Sally Ford?”

“Yes, Mrs. Stone,” Sally answered meekly, her face that of a little old woman again; but her hands trembled as she gathered up the sheet which for a magic ten minutes had been an ermine robe.

“Now, Sally,” continued the matron, moving down the long line of iron cots and inspecting them with a sharp eye, “don’t let this happen again. I depend on you big girls to help me discipline the little ones. And by the way Sally, there’s a new girl. She just came this morning, and I’m having Miss Pond send her up to you. You have an empty bed in this dormitory, I believe.”

“Yes, Mrs. Stone,” Sally nodded. “Christine’s bed.” There was nothing in her voice to indicate that she had loved Christine more than any child she had ever had charge of.

“I suppose this new child will be snapped up soon,” Mrs. Stone continued, her severe voice striving to be pleasant and conversational, for she was fond of Sally, in her own way. “She has yellow curls, though I suspect her mother, who has just died and who was a stock company actress, used peroxide on it. But still it’s yellow and it’s curly, and we have at least a hundred applications on file for little girls with golden curly hair.

“Thelma,” she whirled severely upon the eight-year-old child, “what’s this in your bed?” Her broad, heavy palm, sweeping expertly down the sheet-covered iron cot, had encountered something, a piece of broken blue bottle.

“It—it’s mine,” Thelma quivered, her tongue licking upward to catch the first salty tear. “I traded my broken doll for it. I look through it and it makes everything look pretty and blue,” she explained desperately, in the institutional whine. “Oh, please let me keep it, Mrs. Stone!”

But the matron had tossed the bit of blue glass through the nearest window. “You’d cut yourself on it, Thelma,” she justified herself in her stern voice. “I’ll see if I can find another doll for you in the next box of presents that comes in. Now, don’t cry like a baby. You’re a great big girl. It was just a piece of broken old bottle. Well, Sally, you take charge of the new little girl. Make her feel at home. Give her a bath with that insect soap, and make a bundle of her clothes and take them down to Miss Pond.”

She lifted her long, starched skirt as she stepped over one of the scrubber’s puddles of water, then moved majestically through the door.

Clara, the nine-year-old orphan, stuck out her tongue as the white skirt swished through the door, then turned upon Sally, her little face sharp and ugly with hatred.

“Mean old thing! Always buttin’ in! Can’t let us have no fun at all! Some other kid’ll find Thelma’s sapphire and keep it offen her—”

“It isn’t a sapphire,” Sally said dully, her brush beginning to describe new semi-circles on the pine floor. “It’s like she said—just a piece of broken old bottle. And she said she’d try to find you a doll, Thelma.”

“You said it was a sapphire, Sally. You said it was worth millions and millions of dollars. It was a sapphire, long as you said it was, Sally!” Thelma sobbed, as grieved for the loss of illusion as for the loss of her treasure.

“I reckon I’m plumb foolish to go on play-acting all the time,” Sally Ford said dully.

The three little girls and the 16-year-old “mother” of them scrubbed in silence for several minutes, doggedly hurrying to make up for lost time. Then Thelma, who could never nurse grief or anger, spoke cheerfully:

“Reckon the new kid’s gettin’ her phys’cal zamination. When I come into the ’sylum you had to nearly boil me alive. ’N Mrs. Stone cut off all my hair clean to the skin. ’N ’en nobody wouldn’t ’dopt me ’cause I looked like sich a scarecrow. But I got lotsa hair now, ain’t I, Sal-lee?”

“Oh, somebody’ll be adopting you first thing you know, and then I won’t have any Thelma,” Sally smiled at her.

“Say, Sal-lee” Clara wheedled, “why didn’t nobody ever ’dopt you? I think you’re awful pretty. Sometimes it makes me feel all funny and cry-ey inside, you look so awful pretty. When you’re play-actin’,” she amended honestly. Sally Ford moved the big brush with angry vigor, while her pale face colored a dull red. “I ain’t—I mean, I’m not pretty at all, Clara. But thank you just the same. I used to want to be adopted, but now I don’t. I want to hurry up and get to be eighteen so’s I can leave the asylum and make my own living. I want—” but she stopped herself in time. Not to these open-mouthed, wide-eared children could she tell her dream of dreams.

“But why wasn’t you adopted, Sal-lee?” Betsy, the baby of the group, insisted. “You been here forever and ever, ain’t you?”

“Since I was four years old,” Sally admitted from between lips held tight to keep them from trembling. “When I was little as you, Betsy, one of the big girls told me I was sickly and awf’ly tiny and scrawny when I was brought in, so nobody wanted to adopt me. They don’t like sickly babies,” she added bitterly. “They just want fat little babies with curly hair. Seems to me like the Lord oughta made all orphans pretty, with golden curly hair.”

“I know why Sally wasn’t ’dopted,” Thelma clamored for attention. “I heard Miss Pond say it was a sin and a shame the way old Stone-Face has kept Sally here, year in and year out, jist ’cause she’s so good to us little kids. Miss Pond said Sally is better’n any trained nurse when us kids get sick and that she does more work than any ‘big girl’ they ever had here. That’s why you ain’t been ’dopted, Sally.”

“I know it,” Sally confessed in a low voice. “But I couldn’t be mean to the babies, just so they’d want to get rid of me and let somebody adopt me. Besides,” she added, “I’m scared of people—outside. I’m scared of all grown-up people, especially of adopters,” she blurted miserably. “I can’t sashay up and down before ’em and act cute and laugh and pretend like I’ve got a sweet disposition and like I’m crazy about ’em. I don’t look pretty a bit when the adopters send for me. I can’t play-act then.”

“You’re bashful, Sal-lee,” Clara told her shrewdly. “I’m not bashful—much, except when visitors come and we have to show off our company manners. I hate visitors! They whisper about us, call us ‘poor little things,’ and think they’re better’n us.”

The floor of the big room had been completely scrubbed, and was giving out a moist odor of yellow soap when Miss Pond, who worked in the office on the first floor of the big main building, arrived leading a reluctant little girl by the hand.

To the four orphans in faded blue and white gingham the newcomer looked unbelievably splendid, more like the “princess” that Betsy had been impersonating than like a mortal child. Her golden hair hung in precisely arranged curls to her shoulders. Her dress was of pink crepe de chine, trimmed with many yards of cream-colored lace. There were pink silk socks and little white kid slippers. And her pretty face, though it was streaked with tears, had been artfully coated with white powder and tinted, on cheeks and lips, with carmine rouge.

“This is Eloise Durant, girls,” said Miss Pond, who was incurably sentimental and kind to orphans. “She’s feeling a little homesick now and I know you will all try to make her happy. You’ll take charge of her, won’t you, Sally dear?”

“Yes, Miss Pond,” Sally answered automatically, but her arms were already yearning to gather the little bundle of elegance and tears and homesickness.

“And Sally,” Miss Pond said nervously, lowering her voice in the false hope that the weeping child might not hear her, “Mrs. Stone says her hair must be washed and then braided, like the other children’s. Eloise tells us it isn’t naturally curly, that her mother did it up on kid curlers every night. Her aunt’s been doing it for her since her mother—died.”

“I don’t want to be an orphan,” the newcomer protested passionately, a white-slippered foot flying out suddenly and kicking Miss Pond on the shin.

It was then that Sally took charge. She knelt, regardless of frantic, kicking little feet, and put her arms about Eloise Durant. She began to whisper to the terror-stricken child, and Miss Pond scurried away, her kind eyes brimming with tears, her kind heart swelling with impractical plans for finding luxurious homes and incredibly kind foster parents for all the orphans in the asylum—but especially for those with golden curly hair and blue eyes. For Miss Pond was a born “adopter,” with all the typical adopter’s prejudices and preferences.

When scarcely two minutes after the noon dinner bell had clanged deafeningly, hundreds of little girls and big girls in faded blue and white gingham came tumbling from every direction, to halt and form a decorous procession just outside the dining hall doors, Sally and her new little charge were among them. But only the sharp eyes of the other orphans could have detected that the child who clung forlornly to Sally’s hand was a newcomer. The golden curls had disappeared, and in their place were two short yellow braids, the ends tied with bits of old shoe-string. The small face, scrubbed clean of its powder and rouge, was as pale as Sally’s. And instead of lace-trimmed pink crepe de chine, silk socks and white kid slippers, Eloise was clad, like every other orphan, in a skimpy gingham frock, coarse black stockings and heavy black shoes.

And when the marching procession of orphans had distributed itself before long, backless benches, drawn up to long, narrow pine tables covered with torn, much-scrubbed white oilcloth, Eloise, coached in that ritual as well as in many others sacred in the institution, piped up with all the others, her voice as monotonous as theirs:

“Our heavenly Father, we thank Thee for this food and for all the other blessings Thou giveth us.”

Sally Ford, keeping a watchful, pitying eye on her new charge, who was only nibbling at the unappetizing food, found herself looking upon the familiar scene with the eyes of the frightened little new orphan. It was a game that Sally Ford often played—imagining herself someone else, seeing familiar things through eyes which had never beheld them before.

Because Eloise was a “new girl,” Sally was permitted to keep her at her side after the noon dinner. It was Sally who showed her all the buildings of the big orphanage, pointed out the boys’ dormitories, separated from the girls’ quarters by the big kitchen garden; showed her the bare schoolrooms, in which Sally herself had just completed the third year of high school. It was Sally who pridefully showed her the meagerly equipped gymnasium, the gift of a miraculously philanthropic session of the state legislature; it was Sally who conducted her through the many rooms devoted to hand crafts suited to girls—showing off a bit as she expertly manipulated a hand loom.

Eloise’s hot little hand clung tightly to Sally’s on the long trip of inspection of her new “home.” But her cry, hopeless and monotonous now, even taking on a little of the institutional whine, was still the same heartbroken protest she had uttered upon her arrival in the dormitory: “I don’t want to be an orphan! I don’t want to be an orphan, Sal-lee!”

“It ain’t—I mean, isn’t—so bad,” Sally comforted her. “Sometimes we have lots of fun. And Christmas is awf’ly nice. Every girl gets an orange and a little sack of candy and a present. And we have turkey for dinner, and ice cream.”

“My mama gave me candy every day,” Eloise whimpered. “Her men friends brung it to her—boxes and boxes of it, and flowers, too. God was mean to let her die, and make an orphan outa me!”

And because Sally herself had frequently been guilty of the same sinful thought, she hurried Eloise, without rebuking her, to the front lawn which always made visitors exclaim, “Why, how pretty! And so homelike! Aren’t the poor things fortunate to have such a beautiful home?”

For the front lawn, upon which no orphan was allowed to set foot except in company with a lawnmower or a clipping shears, was beautiful. Now, in early June, it lay in the sun like an immense carpet, studded with round or star-shaped beds of bright flowers. From the front, the building looked stately and grand, too, with its clean red bricks and its big, fluted white pillars. They were the only two orphans in sight, except a pair of overalled boys, their tow heads bare to the hot sun, their lean arms, bare to the shoulders in their ragged shirts, pushing steadily against whirring lawnmowers.

“Oh, nasturtiums!” Eloise crowed, the first happy sound she had made since entering the orphanage.

She broke from Sally’s grasp, sped down the cement walk, then plunged into the lush greenness of that vast velvet carpet, entirely unconscious that she was committing one of the major crimes of the institution. Sally, after a stunned moment, sped after her, calling out breathlessly:

“Don’t dast to touch the flowers, Eloise! We ain’t allowed to touch the flowers! They’d skin us alive!”

But Eloise had already broken the stem of a flaming orange and red nasturtium and was cuddling it against her cheek.

“Put it back, honey,” Sally begged, herself committing the unpardonable sin of walking on the grass. “There isn’t any place at all you could hide it, and if you carried it in your hand you’d get a licking sure. But don’t you cry, Eloise. Sally’ll tell you a fairy story in play hour this afternoon.”

The two, Sally’s heart already swelling with the sweet pain of having found a new child to mother, Eloise’s tear-reddened eyes sparkling with anticipation, were hurrying up the path that led around the main building to the weaving rooms in which Sally was to work an extra hour as punishment for her morning’s “play-acting,” when Clara Hodges came shrieking from behind the building:

“Sal-lee! Sal-lee Ford! Mrs. Stone wants you. In the office!” she added, her voice dropping slightly on a note of horror.

“What for?” Sally pretended grown up unconcern, but her face, which had been pretty and glowing a moment before, was dull and institutional and sullen again.

“They’s a man—a farmer man—talking to Stone-Face,” Clara whispered, her eyes furtive and mean as they darted about to see if she were overheard. “Oh, Sal-lee, don’t let ’em ’dopt you! We wouldn’t have nobody to play-act for us and tell us stories! Please, Sal-lee! Make faces at him when Stone-Face ain’t lookin’ so’s he won’t like you!”

“I’m too big to be adopted,” Sally reassured her. “Nobody wants to adopt a 16-year-old girl. Here, you take Eloise to the weaving room with you.”

Her voice was that of a managing, efficient, albeit loving mother, but when she turned toward the front steps of the main building her feet began to drag heavily, weighted with a fear which was reflected in her darkling blue eyes, and in the deepened pallor of her cheeks. But, oh, maybe it wasn’t that! Why did she always have to worry about that—now that she was sixteen? Why couldn’t she expect something perfectly lovely—like—like a father coming to claim his long-lost daughter? Maybe there’d be a mother, too—

The vision Sally Ford had conjured up fastened wings to her feet. She was breathless, glowing, when she arrived at the closed door of the dread “office.”

When Sally Ford opened the door of the office of the orphan asylum, radiance was wiped instantly from her delicate face, as if she had been stricken with sudden illness. For her worst fear was realized—the fear that had kept her awake many nights on her narrow cot, since her sixteenth birthday had passed. She cowered against the door, clinging to the knob as if she were trying to screw up her courage to flee from the disaster which fate, in bringing about her sixteenth birthday, had pitilessly planned for her, instead of the boon of long-lost relatives for which she had never entirely ceased to hope.

“Sally!” Mrs. Stone, seated at the big roll-top desk, called sharply. “Say ‘How do you do?’ to the gentleman.... The girls are taught the finest of manners here, Mr. Carson, but they are always a little shy with strangers.”

“Howdy-do, Mr. Carson,” Sally gasped in a whisper.

“I believe this is the girl you asked for, Mr. Carson,” Mrs. Stone went on briskly, in her pleasant “company voice,” which every orphan could imitate with bitter accuracy.

The man, a tall, gaunt, middle-aged farmer, nodded, struggled to speak, then hastily bent over a brass cuspidor and spat. That necessary act performed, he eyed Sally with a keen, speculative gaze. His lean face was tanned to the color and texture of brown leather, against which a coating of talcum powder, applied after a close shave of his black beard, showed ludicrously.

“Yes, mum, that’s the girl, all right. Seen her when I was here last June. Wouldn’t let me have her then, mum, you may recollect.”

Mrs. Stone smiled graciously. “Yes, I remember, Mr. Carson, and I was very sorry to disappoint you, but we have an unbreakable rule here not to board out one of our dear little girls until she is sixteen years old. Sally was sixteen last week, and now that school is out, I see no reason why she shouldn’t make her home with your family for the summer—or longer if you like. The law doesn’t compel us to send the girls to school after they are sixteen, you know.”

“Yes’m, I’ve looked into the law,” the farmer admitted. Then he turned his shrewd, screwed-up black eyes upon Sally again. “Strong, healthy girl, I reckon? No sickness, no bad faults, willing to work for her board and keep?”

He rose, lifting his great length in sections, and slouched over to the girl who still cowered against the door. His big-knuckled brown hands fastened on her forearms, and when she shrank from his touch he nodded with satisfaction. “Good big muscles, even if she is a skinny little runt. I always say these skinny, wiry little women can beat the fat ones all hollow.”

“Sally is strong and she’s marvelous with children. We’ve never had a better worker than Sally, and since she’s been raised in the Home, she’s used to work, Mr. Carson, although no one could say we are not good to our girls. I’m sure you’ll find her a willing helper on the farm. Did your wife come into town with you this afternoon?”

“Her? In berry-picking time?” Mr. Carson was plainly amazed. “No, mum, I come in alone. My daughter’s laid up today with a summer cold, or she’d be in with me, nagging me for money for her finery. But you know how girls are, mum. Now, seeing as how my wife’s near crazy with work, what with the field hands to feed and all, and my daughter laid up with a cold, I’d like to take this girl here along with me. You know me, mum. Reckon I don’t have to wait to be investigated no more.”

Mrs. Stone was already reaching for a pen. “Perfectly all right, Mr. Carson. Though it does put me in rather a tight place. Sally has been taking care of a dormitory of nineteen of the small girls, and it is going to upset things a bit, for tonight anyway. But I understand how it is with you. You’re going to be in town attending to business for an hour or so, I suppose, Mr. Carson? Sally will have to get her things together. You could call for her about five, I suppose?”

“Yes, mum, five it is!” The farmer spat again, rubbed his hand on his trousers, then offered it to Mrs. Stone. “And thank you, mum, I’ll take good care of the young-un. But I guess she thinks she’s a young lady now, eh, miss?” And he tweaked Sally’s ear, his fingers feeling like sand-paper against her delicate skin.

“Tell Mr. Carson, Sally, that you’ll appreciate having a nice home for the summer—a nice country home,” Mrs. Stone prompted, her eye stern and commanding.

And Sally, taught all her life to conceal her feelings from those in authority and to obey implicitly, gulped against the lump in her throat so that she could utter the lie in the language which Mrs. Stone had chosen.

The matron closed the door upon herself and the farmer, leaving Sally a quivering, sobbing little thing, huddled against the wall, her nails digging into the flesh of her palms. If anyone had asked her: “Sally, why is your heart broken? Why do you cry like that?” she could not have answered intelligently. She would have groped for words to express that quality within her that burned a steady flame all these years, unquenchable, even under the soul-stifling, damp blanket of charity. She knew dimly that it was pride—a fierce, arrogant pride, that told her that Sally Ford, by birth, was entitled to the best that life had to offer.

And now—her body quivered with an agony which had no name and which was the more terrible for its namelessness—she was to be thrust out into the world, or that part of the world represented by Clem Carson and his family. To eat the bitter bread of charity, to slave for the food she put into her stomach, which craved delicacies she had never tasted; to be treated as a servant, to have the shame of being an orphan, a child nobody wanted, continuously held up before her shrinking, hunted eyes—that was the fate which being sixteen had brought upon Sally Ford.

Every June they came—farmers like Clem Carson, seeking “hired girls” whom they would not have to pay. Carson himself had taken three girls from the orphanage.

Rena Cooper, who had gone to the Carson farm when Sally was thirteen, had come back to the Home in September, a broken, dispirited thing—Rena, who had been so gay and bright and saucy. Annie Springer had been his choice the next year, and Annie had never come back. The story that drifted into the orphanage by some mysterious grapevine had it that Annie had found a “fellow” on the farm, a hired man, with whom she had wandered away without the formality of a marriage ceremony.

The third summer, when he could not have Sally, he had taken Ruby Presser, pretty, sweet little Ruby, who had been in love with Eddie Cobb, one of the orphaned boys, since she was thirteen or fourteen years old. Eddie had run away from the Home, after promising Ruby to come back for her and marry her when he was grown-up and making enough money for two to live on.

Ruby had gotten into mysterious trouble on the Carson farm—the “grapevine” never supplied concrete details—and Ruby had run away from the farm, only to be caught by the police and sent to the reformatory, the particular hell with which every orphan was threatened if she dared disobey even a minor rule of the Home. Delicate, sweet little Ruby in the reformatory—that evil place where “incorrigibles” poisoned the minds of good girls like Ruby Presser, made criminals of them, too.

Sally, remembering, as she cowered against the door of the orphanage office, was suddenly fiercely glad that Ruby had thrown herself from a fifth-floor window of the reformatory. Ruby, dead, was safe now from charity and evil and from queer, warped, ugly girls who whispered terrible things as they huddled on the cots of their cells.

“Oh, Sally, dear, what is the matter?” A soft, sighing voice broke in on Sally’s grief and fear, a bony hand was laid comfortingly on Sally’s dark head.

“Mr. Carson, that farmer who takes a girl every summer, is going to take me home with him tonight,” Sally gulped.

“But that will be nice, Sally!” Miss Pond gushed. “You will have a real home, with plenty to eat and maybe some nice little dresses to wear, and make new friends—”

“Yes, Miss Pond,” Sally nodded, held thrall by twelve years of enforced acquiescence. “But, oh, Miss Pond, I’d been hoping it was—my father—or my mother, or somebody I belong to—”

“Why, Sally, you haven’t a father, dear, and your mother—But, mercy me, I mustn’t be running on like this,” Miss Pond caught herself up hastily, a fearful eye on the closed door.

“Miss Pond,” Sally pleaded, “won’t you please, please tell me something about myself before I go away? I know you’re not allowed to, but oh, Miss Pond, please! It’s so cruel not to know anything! Please, Miss Pond! You’ve always been so sweet to me—”

The little touch of flattery did it, or maybe it was the pathos in those wide, blue eyes.

“It’s against the rules,” Miss Pond wavered. “But—I know how you feel, Sally dear. I was raised in the Home myself, not knowing—. I can’t get your card out of the files now; Mrs. Stone might come and catch me. But I’ll make some excuse to come up to the locker room when you’re getting your things together. Oh—” she broke off. “I was just telling Sally how nice it will be for her to have a real home, Mrs. Stone.”

Mrs. Stone closed the door firmly, her eyes stern upon Sally. “Of course it will be nice. And Sally must be properly appreciative. I did not at all like your manner to Mr. Carson, Sally. But run along now and pack. You may take your Sunday dress and shoes, and one of your every-day ginghams. Mr. Carson will provide your clothes. His daughter is about your age, and he says her last year’s dresses will be nicer than anything you’ve ever had.”

“Yes, Mrs. Stone,” Sally ducked her head and sidled out of the door, but before it closed she exchanged a fleet, meaningful look with Miss Pond.

“I’m going to know!” Sally whispered to herself, as she ran down the long, narrow corridor. “I’m going to know! About my mother!” And color swept over her face, performing the miracle that changed her from a colorless little orphan into a near-beauty.

Because she was leaving the orphanage for a temporary new home on the Carson farm, Sally was permitted to take her regular Saturday night bath that afternoon. In spite of her terror of the future, the girl who had never known any home but a state orphan asylum felt a thrill of adventure as she splashed in a painted tin tub, gloriously alone, unhurried by clamorous girls waiting just outside.

The cold water—there was no hot water for bathing from April first to October first—made her skin glow and tingle. As she dried herself on a ragged wisp of grayish-white Turkish toweling, Sally surveyed her slim, white body with shy pride. Shorn of the orphanage uniform she might have been any pretty young girl budding into womanhood, so slim and rounded and pinky-white she was.

“I guess I’m kinda pretty,” Sally whispered to herself, as she thrust her face close to the small, wavery mirror that could not quite succeed in destroying her virginal loveliness. “Sweet sixteen and—never been kissed,” she smiled to herself, then bent forward and gravely laid her pink, deliciously curved lips against the mirrored ones.

Then, in a panic lest she be too late to see kind Miss Pond, she jerked on the rest of her clothing.

“Dear Sally, how sweet you look!” Miss Pond clasped her hands in admiration as Sally slipped, breathless, into the locker-room that contained the clothes of all the girls of her dormitory.

“Did you bring the card that tells all about me—and my mother?” Sally brushed the compliment aside and demanded in an eager whisper.

“No, dearie, I was afraid Mrs. Stone might want it to make an entry about Mr. Carson’s taking you for the summer, but I copied the data. You go ahead with your packing while I tell you what I found out,” Miss Pond answered nervously, but her pale gray eyes were sparkling with pleasure in her mild little escapade.

Sally unlocked her own particular locker with the key that always hung on a string about her neck, but almost immediately she whirled upon Miss Pond, her eyes imploring. “It won’t take me a minute to pack, Miss Pond. Please go right on and tell me!”

“Well, Sally, I’m afraid there isn’t much to tell.” Miss Pond smoothed a folded bit of paper apologetically. “The record says you were brought here May 9, 1912, just twelve years ago, by a woman who said you were her daughter. She gave your birthday as June 2, 1908, and her name as Mrs. Nora Ford, a widow, aged 28—”

“Oh, she’s young!” Sally breathed ecstatically. Then her face clouded, as her nimble brain did a quick sum in mental arithmetic. “But she’d be forty now, wouldn’t she? Forty seems awfully old—”

“Forty is comparatively young, Sally!” Miss Pond, who was looking regretfully back upon forty herself, said rather tartly. “But let me hurry on. She gave poverty and illness as her reasons for asking the state to take care of you. She said your father was dead.”

“Oh, poor mother!” A shadow flitted across Sally’s delicate face; quick tears for the dead father and the ill, poverty-stricken mother filmed her blue eyes.

“The state accepted you provisionally, and shortly afterward sent an investigator to check up on her story,” Miss Pond went on. “The investigator found that the woman, Mrs. Ford, had left the city—it was Stanton, thirty miles from here—and that no one knew where she had gone. From that day to this we have had no word from the woman who brought you here. She was a mystery in Stanton, and has remained a mystery until now. I’m sorry, Sally, that I can’t tell you more.”

“Oh!” Sally’s sharp cry was charged with such pain and disappointment that Miss Pond took one of the little clenched fists between her own thin hands, not noticing that the slip of paper fluttered to the floor. “She didn’t write to know how I was, didn’t care whether I lived or died! I wish I hadn’t asked! I thought maybe there was somebody, someone who loved me—”

“Remember she was sick and poor, Sally. Maybe she went to a hospital suddenly and—and died. But there was no report in any papers of the state of her death,” Miss Pond added conscientiously. “You mustn’t grieve, Sally. You’re nearly grown up. You’ll be leaving us when you’re eighteen, unless you want to stay on as an assistant matron or as a teacher—”

“Oh, no, no!” Sally cried. “I—I’ll pack now, Miss Pond. And thank you a million times for telling me, even if it did hurt.”

In her distress Miss Pond trotted out of the locker-room without a thought for the bit of paper on which she had scribbled the memorandum of Sally’s pitifully meager life history. But Sally had not forgotten it. She snatched it from the floor and pinned it to her “body waist,” a vague resolution forming in her troubled heart.

When five o’clock came Sally Ford was waiting in the office for Clem Carson, her downcast eyes fixed steadily upon the small brown paper parcel in her lap, color staining her neck and cheeks and brow, for Mrs. Stone, stiffly, awkwardly but conscientiously, was doing her institutional best to arm the state’s charge for her first foray into the outside world.

“And so, Sally, I want you to remember to—to keep your body pure and your mind clean,” Mrs. Stone summed up, her strong, heavy face almost as red as Sally’s own. “You’re too young to go out with young men, but you’ll be meeting the hired hands on the farm. You—you mustn’t let them take liberties of any kind with you. We try to give you girls in the Home a sound religious and moral training, and if—if you’re led astray it will be due to the evils in your own nature and not to lack of proper Christian training. You understand me, Sally?” she added severely.

“Yes, Mrs. Stone,” Sally answered in a smothered voice.

Sally’s hunted eyes glanced wildly about for a chance of escape and lighted upon the turning knob of the door. In a moment Clem Carson was edging in, his face slightly flushed, a tell-tale odor of whisky and cloves on his breath.

“Little lady all ready to go?” he inquired with a suspiciously jovial laugh, which made Sally crouch lower in her chair. “Looking pretty as a picture, too! With two pretty girls in my house this summer, reckon I’ll have to stand guard with a shotgun to keep the boys away.”

Word had gone round that Sally Ford was leaving the Home for the summer, and as Clem Carson and his new unpaid hired girl walked together down the long cement walk to where his car was parked at the curb, nearly three hundred little girls, packed like a herd of sheep in the wire-fenced playground adjoining the front lawn, sang out goodbys and good wishes.

“Goodby Sal-lee! Hope you have a good time!”

“Goodby, Sal-lee! Write me a letter, Sal-lee!” “Goodby, goodby!”

Sally, waving her Sunday handkerchief, craned her neck for a last sight of those blue-and-white-ginghamed little girls, the only playmates and friends she had in the world. There were tears in her eyes, and, queerly, for she thought she hated the Home, a stab of homesickness shooting through her heart. How safe they were, there in the playground pen! How simple and sheltered life was in the Home, after all! Suddenly she knew, somehow, that it was the last time she would ever see it, or the children.

Without a thought for the iron-clad “Keep off the grass” rule, Sally turned and ran, fleetly, her little figure as graceful as a fawn’s, over the thick velvet carpet of the lawn. When she reached the high fence that separated her from the other orphans, she spread her arms, as if she would take them all into her embrace.

“Don’t forget me, kids!” she panted, her voice thick with tears. “I—I want to tell you I love you all, and I’m sorry for every mean thing I ever did to any of you, and I hope you all get adopted by rich papas and mamas and have ice cream every day! Goodby, kids! Goodby!”

“Kiss me goodby, Sal-lee!” a little whining voice pleaded.

Sally stooped and pressed her lips, through the fence opening, against the babyish mouth of little Eloise Durant, the newest and most forlorn orphan of them all.

“Me, too, Sal-lee! Me, too! We won’t have nobody to play-act for us now!” Betsy wailed, pressing her tear-stained face against the wire.