Elsie Marley, Honey | Page 6

lady and a little boy, smiled and nodded. Elsie Marley half smiled. Still the other made no move. Then she looked back, really smiled, and beckoned her to a place beside her.
Elsie Moss, more than willing to be summoned, had some difficulty in getting away from her present companions. But the grandmother prevailed upon the little boy to spare her, and she presented herself at Elsie Marley's seat smiling in her irresistible way with the big dimples indented, and looking as if she would like to hug her as she had hugged the little girl outside. And Elsie Marley had a curious intimation that she shouldn't have minded greatly.
"What do you think," exclaimed Miss Moss as she seated herself, "you know all my family history and I don't even know your name. I've been guessing. It ought to be either Isabel or Hildegarde. Is it? Oh, I do wish it were, they're both so sort of stately and princess-like that they'd just suit you."
"It isn't either," responded the other with a curious sense of disappointment. "My name is Elsie also."
"Of all things! But it's rather jolly, after all. And what's the rest?"
"Marley, Elsie Pritchard Marley. But at home they called me Elsie Pritchard, because I am--all Pritchard."
Unacquainted with the Pritchard distinction, Elsie Moss was not impressed. But she exclaimed gleefully over the real surname.
"Elsie Marley!" she cried. "Why, isn't that funny, and oh, isn't it dear! Elsie Marley, honey!"
The other girl looked blank.
"Of course you know the song, or at least the rhyme?"
"Song? Rhyme?"
"Why, yes. You must have heard it: 'And Do You Ken Elsie Marley, Honey?'"
"Is it really and truly Elsie Marley?" queried the pale Elsie speaking for the first time like a real girl, though she had no girlish vocabulary from which to draw.
"Sure," asserted the other, delighted to be able to surprise her seatmate. And she sang a stanza in the sweetest voice Elsie Marley had ever heard, though she had heard good music all her life, and famous singers.
"Do you ken Elsie Marley, honey? The wife who sells the barley, honey? She won't get up to serve her swine, And do you ken Elsie Marley, honey?"
"Is there--any more?" demanded Elsie Marley almost eagerly.
"One more, and then you just repeat the first. I've known it all my life. Mother used to sing it to me when I was a baby. Then a few years ago when I first went to see vaudeville, I 'got it up,' as they say, with dancing and a little acting. I used to spring it on people that came to the house. Dad liked it, but it made my stepmother feel bad--dad said because I was too professional."
She sighed deeply.
"Sing the rest, please, Elsie?" asked the other, using her name for the first time.
"I will if you'll let me call you Elsie-Honey? You see it really belongs."
Elsie knew that it was silly, but she found herself quite willing. She seemed under a strange spell.
"Only," she added, with a stronger sensation of discomfort, "after to-morrow it isn't likely we'll ever see one another again."
"Oh, yes we will, sure. Why, we just must--at least if you want to half as much as I do, Elsie-Honey?"
"I do," Elsie confessed shyly and now with a curiously pleasant feeling. "And now, Elsie, please sing the other stanzas."
"It sounds just dear to say stanzas," cried the other. "I should always say verses, even if I didn't forget which was which."
With an absurd little flourish of her hands, she turned slightly in her seat. The dimples came out strongly, and though she sat quite still, there was truly something dramatic in the manner in which the would-be actress sang the lines.
"Elsie Marley is grown so fine She won't get up to feed the swine, But lies in bed till eight or nine, And surely she does take her time.
Do you ken Elsie Marley, honey? The wife who sells the barley, honey? She won't get up to serve her swine, And do you ken Elsie Marley, honey?"
Both girls broke into natural, infectious laughter. Mr. and Mrs. Bliss, or any one who had known Elsie Marley, could scarcely have believed their eyes or credited their hearing. But Elsie's father, who had died while she was an infant, had had a warm heart and a keen sense of humor, and it might well be that his daughter had inherited something of this that had lain dormant all the while. For truly, the wholesome, hardy qualities brought out in others through simple human association had had little chance to germinate in her hothouse existence in the Pritchard household.
Despite the rumble of the train, four children in the rear of the car caught the sound of the singing and came trooping up begging for more. A pretty nursemaid followed with a fat, smiling infant.