During the days that Mr. Peck had consented to leave Idella with her Annie

took the whole charge of the child, and grew into an intimacy with her

that was very sweet. It was not necessary to this that Idella should be

always tractable and docile, which she was not, but only that she should

be affectionate and dependent; Annie found that she even liked her to be

a little baddish; it gave her something to forgive; and she experienced a

perverse pleasure in discovering that the child of a man so self-forgetful

as Mr. Peck was rather more covetous than most children. It also amused her

that when some of Idella's shabby playmates from Over the Track casually

found their way to the woods past Annie's house, and tried to tempt Idella

to go with them, the child disowned them, and ran into the house from

them; so soon was she alienated from her former life by her present social

advantages. She apparently distinguished between Annie and the Boltons, or

if not quite this, she showed a distinct preference for her company, and

for her part of the house. She hung about Annie with a flattering curiosity

and interest in all she did. She lost every trace of shyness with her, but

developed an intense admiration for her in every way--for her dresses, her

rings, her laces, for the elegancies that marked her a gentlewoman. She

pronounced them prettier than Mrs. Warner's things, and the house prettier

and larger.

"Should you like to live with me?" Annie asked.

The child seemed to reflect. Then she said, with the indirection of her age

and sex, pushing against Annie's knee, "I don't know what your name is."

"Have you never heard my name? It's Annie. How do you like it?"

"It's--it's too short," said the child, from her readiness always to answer

something that charmed Annie.

"Well, then you can make it longer. You can call me Aunt Annie. I think

that will be better for a little girl; don't you?"

"Mothers can whip, but aunts can't," said Idella, bringing a practical

knowledge, acquired from her observation of life Over the Track, to a

consideration of the proposed relation.

"I know _one_ aunt who won't," said Annie, touched by the reply.

Saturday evening Idella's father came for her; and with a preamble which

seemed to have been unnecessary when he understood it, Annie asked him to

let her keep the child, at least till he had settled himself in a house of

his own, or, she hinted, in some way more comfortable for Idella than he

was now living. In her anxiety to make him believe that she was not taking

too great a burden on her hands, she became slowly aware that no fear of

this had apparently troubled him, and that he was looking at the whole

matter from a point outside of questions of polite ceremonial, even of

personal feeling.




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