Billie Bradley and Her Classmates: or, The Secret of the Locked Tower. Wheeler Janet D.

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СКАЧАТЬ end of the room. Then as if she realized that something was due the girls, she paused and looked back at them.

      “Draw up chairs close to the fire and warm yourselves,” she directed. “You must be nearly frozen.”

      The girls managed to find three rather rickety old chairs, and these they drew as close to the stove as they could without scorching their clothes. They tried to draw the children into their laps, but the children were either too miserable to want to be touched by strangers or they had become a little shy. At any rate, they drew away so sharply that one of them nearly fell on the stove. This frightened them all and they began to cry dismally.

      The girls were glad when Mrs. Haddon returned with three shabby but warm little bath robes which she hung close to the stove. Then she undressed the children quickly, rubbed their little bodies till they were in a glow, then slipped them into the snug robes.

      And all the time she was doing it she kept up a running fire of conversation with the girls.

      “Thank goodness,” she said, “I only missed the children a little while ago. They have always been so good to play close to the house, and I was so busy I didn’t look out as usual. And to think that they ran away and fell into the lake! Well, it’s only one more trouble, that’s all. It’s funny how a person can become used to trouble after a while.”

      “But it would have been so much worse,” Billie suggested, gently, “if the kiddies had fallen through into deeper water.”

      “Eh?” said Mrs. Haddon, looking up at Billie quickly, then down again. “Yes, I suppose that would have been worse.” Then she added, with a bitterness the girls did not understand: “It isn’t often that the worst doesn’t happen to me.”

      Puzzled, the girls looked at each other, then around the bare, specklessly clean little kitchen.

      That Mrs. Haddon was very poor, there could be no doubt. The shabbiness of the place, her dress, and the children’s clothes all showed that. But could poverty alone account for the sadness in her voice?

      Mrs. Haddon had once been a very pretty woman, and she was sweet looking yet, in spite of the lines of worry about her mouth. She had lovely hair, black as night and thick, but she had arranged it carelessly, and long strands of it had pulled loose from the pins and straggled down over her forehead. At this moment, as though she felt the eyes of the girls upon her, she flung the untidy hair back with an impatient movement.

      “How old are the kiddies?” asked Laura, feeling that the silence was becoming awkward. “They look almost the same age.”

      “There isn’t more than a year’s difference between Mary and Peter here,” indicating the taller of the two little girls and the boy. “And Isabel is thirteen months younger than Peter. Mary is nine years old,” she added as a sort of afterthought.

      “Nine years old!” cried Vi, in surprise. “Why, that would make Peter eight and the little girl seven. I thought they were much younger than that.”

      “Yes,” added Laura, thoughtlessly, “they are very tiny for their age.”

      As though the innocent words had been a deadly insult, the woman rose from her knees and shot the girls so black a glance from her dark eyes that they were frightened.

      “My children are tiny – yes,” she said in a hard voice, repeating what Laura had said. “And no wonder they are small, when for years they have been half starved.”

      Then she turned quickly and herded the three frightened little ones out of the room.

      “You go to bed,” she said to them as they disappeared through the door.

      Left to themselves, the girls looked blankly at one another.

      “Billie, did you hear what I heard?” asked Laura, anxiously. “Did she really mean that the kiddies are so little because they don’t get enough to eat?”

      “Sounds that way,” said Billie pityingly. “Poor little things!”

      “We must find some way to help them,” Vi was beginning when Mrs. Haddon herself came into the room.

      She seemed to be sorry for what she had said, and she told them so. She drew up the only chair that was left in the bare little room and sat down, facing the chums.

      “You must have thought it very strange for me to speak as I did,” she began, and went on hurriedly as the girls seemed about to protest. “But I have had so much trouble for years that sometimes I don’t know just what I’m doing.”

      “Have you lived alone here for very long?” asked Billie, gently.

      “Ever since my husband died,” answered Polly Haddon, leaning back in her chair as though she were tired and smoothing her heavy hair back from her forehead. “He was an inventor,” she went on, encouraged by the girls’ friendly interest, to tell of her troubles. “For years he made hardly enough to keep us alive, and after the children came we had a harder pull of it than ever. Then suddenly,” she straightened up in her chair and into her black eyes came a strange gleam, “suddenly, my husband found the one little thing that was wrong with the invention he had been working on for so long – just some little thing it was, that a child could almost see, yet that he had overlooked – and we were fairly crazy with happiness. We thought we had at last realized our dream of a fortune.”

      She paused a moment, evidently living over that time in her mind, and the girls, fired by her excitement, waited impatiently for her to go on.

      “What happened then?” asked Vi.

      “Then,” said the woman, the light dying out of her eyes, leaving them tired and listless again, “the invention was stolen.”

      “Stolen!” they echoed, breathlessly.

      The woman nodded wearily. She had evidently lost all interest in her story.

      “My husband suspected a Philadelphia knitting company, whom he had told of his invention and who were very enthusiastic over it, of having some hand in the robbery. But when he accused them of it they denied it and offered a reward of twenty thousand dollars for the recovery of the models of the machinery.”

      “Twenty thousand dollars!” repeated Billie in an awed tone. “I guess they must have liked your husband’s invention pretty well to offer all that money for it.”

      The woman nodded, drearily, while two big tears rolled slowly down her face.

      “Yes, I think they would have accepted it and paid my husband almost anything he would have asked for it,” she answered.

      “But haven’t you ever found out who stole it?” asked Vi, eagerly. “I should think that the thief, whoever he is, would have brought the invention back because of the twenty thousand dollars.”

      The woman nodded again.

      “Yes, that was the queer thing about it,” she said. “When the knitting company first told us of the reward we were jubilant, my husband and I. We thought surely we would recover the precious invention then. But as the weeks went by and we heard nothing, the strain was too much. Poor Frank, after all those years of struggle, with victory snatched away at the last minute, when he had every right to think it in his grasp – my poor husband could fight no longer. He died.”

      With these words the poor woman bowed her head upon her hands СКАЧАТЬ