Lovey Mary | Page 4

just as ugly and foolish as you used to be. I'm going in to see Miss Bell."
Lovey Mary waited until she was in the house, then she stole noiselessly around to the office window. The curtain blew out across her cheek, and the swaying lilacs seemed to be trying to count the china buttons on her back; but she stood there with staring eyes and parted lips, and held her breath to listen.
[Illustration with caption: "'Come here, Tom, and kiss your mother.'"]
"Of course," Miss Bell was saying, measuring her words with due precision, "if you feel that you can now support your child and that it is your duty to take him, we cannot object. There are many other children waiting to come into the home. And yet--" Miss Bell's voice sounded human and unnatural--"yet I wish he could stay. Have you thought, Kate, of your responsibility toward him, of--"
"Oh! Ough!" shrieked Tommy from the playground, in tones of distress.
Lovey Mary left her point of vantage and rushed to the rescue. She found him emitting frenzied yells, while a tiny stream of blood trickled down his chin.
"It was my little duck," he gasped as soon as he was able to speak. "I was tissin' him, an' he bited me."
At thought of the base ingratitude on the part of the duck, Tommy wailed anew. Lovey Mary led him to the hydrant and bathed the injured lip, while she soothed his feelings. Suddenly a wave of tenderness swept over her. She held his chubby face up to hers and said fervently:
"Tommy, do you love me?"
"Yes," said Tommy, with a reproachful eye on the duck. "Yes; I yuv to yuv. I don't yuv to tiss, though!"
"But me, Tommy, me. Do you love me?"
"Yes," he answered gravely, "dollar an' a half."
"Whose little boy are you?"
"Yuvey's 'e boy."
Satisfied with this catechism, she put Tommy in care of another girl and went back to her post at the window. Miss Bell was talking again.
"I will have him ready to-morrow afternoon when you come. His clothes are all in good condition. I only hope, Kate, that you will care for him as tenderly as Mary has. I am afraid he will miss her sadly."
"If he's like me, he'll forget about her in two or three days," answered the other voice. "It always was 'out of sight, out of mind' with me."
Miss Bell's answer was indistinct, and in a few minutes Lovey Mary heard the hall door close behind them. She shook her fists until the lilacs trembled. "She sha'n't have him!" she whispered fiercely. "She sha'n't let him grow up wicked like she is. I won't let him go. I'll hide him, I'll--"
Suddenly she grew very still, and for a long time crouched motionless behind the bushes. The problem that faced her had but one solution, and Lovey Mary had found it.
The next morning when the sun climbed over the tree-tops and peered into the dormitory windows he found that somebody else had made an early rise. Lovey Mary was sitting by a wardrobe making her last will and testament. From the neatly folded pile of linen she selected a few garments and tied them into a bundle. Then she took out a cigar-box and gravely contemplated the contents. There were two narrow hair- ribbons which had evidently been one wide ribbon, a bit of rock crystal, four paper dolls, a soiled picture-book with some other little girl's name scratched out on the cover, and two shining silver dollars. These composed Lovey Mary's worldly possessions. She tied the money in her handkerchief and put it in her pocket, then got up softly and slipped about among the little white beds, distributing her treasures.
"I'm mad at Susie," she whispered, pausing before a tousled head; "I hate to give her the nicest thing I've got. But she's just crazy 'bout picture-books."
The curious sun climbed yet a little higher and saw Lovey Mary go back to her own bed, and, rolling Tommy's clothes around her own bundle, gather the sleeping child in her arms and steal quietly out of the room. Then the sun got too high up in the heavens to watch little runaway orphan girls. Nobody saw her steal through the deserted playroom, down the clean bare steps, which she had helped to wear away, and out through the yard to the coal-shed. Here she got the reluctant Tommy into his clothes, and tied on his little round straw hat, so absurdly like her own.
"Is we playin' hie-spy, Yuvey?" asked the mystified youngster.
"Yes, Tommy," she whispered, "and we are going a long way to hide. You are my little boy now, and you must love me better than anything in the world. Say it, Tommy; say, 'I love you better 'n anybody in the whole world.'"
"Will I det