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"I've seen Lallie and Digby at Sunday-school." "Yes, Mr. Popham is a Methodist and I'm a Congregationalist, but I say let the children go where they like, so I always take them with me." Mrs. Carey was just struggling to conceal her amusement at this religious flexibility on Mrs. Popham's part, when she espied Nancy flying down the street, bareheaded, waving a bit of paper in the air.
And the voice of a man, sobbing and breaking between the exclamatives: "My little Lallie Dear Helen how long I've waited sweetheart how many years!" And the voice of Annette. "Only a few more years to wait, dearest and now that you have faith, I can come to you sometimes but, oh, dearest, I foresee a danger a great danger!"
Popham's pessimism, which had grown prodigiously from living in the house with his optimism; his anecdotes of Lallie Joy Popham, who was given to moods, having inherited portions of her father's incurable hopefulness, and fragments of her mother's ineradicable gloom, these were of a character that made the finishing of the hall a matter of profound unimportance.
He was on his feet, was pacing the floor in his jerky little walk. When, after one course of the drawing-room, he turned back, Mrs. Markham had taken her hand from her eyes, and was facing him. "Oh, why did you do that?" she asked. "It has its effect on me you do not know how much!" Her manner spoke a smothered irritation. "I shall not see Lallie to-night. And she was very near."
"Aren't your legs in good working order?" Uncomprehending silence on Lallie Joy's part and then Nancy returned to the onslaught. "Don't you like to look at pretty things?" "Dunno but I do, an' dunno as I do." "Don't you love the rooms your father has finished here?" "Kind of." "Not any more than that?" "Pop thinks some of 'em's queer, an' so does Bill Harmon."
She was fully up to time too, you may be sure, as her rival, Mrs. Bill Harmon, was opposite her in the set. Lallie Joy, clad in one of Kathleen's dresses, her hair dressed by Julia, was a daily attendant at the Vacation School, but five weeks of steady instruction had not sufficed to make her sure of ladies' grand chain.
"Are you 'most ready to come home, Muddy?" she called, without coming any nearer. "Yes, quite ready, now Lallie has brought the milk. Good morning, Mrs. Popham; the children want me for some new enterprise." "You give yourself most too much to 'em," expostulated Mrs. Popham; "you don't take no vacations." "Ah, well, you see 'myself' is all I have to give them," answered Mrs.
She sat wrong; she held the potato pan wrong, and the potatoes and the knife wrong. There seemed to be no sort of connection between her mind and her body. As she peeled potatoes and Nancy seeded raisins, the conversation was something like this. "How did you chance to bring the butter to-day instead of to-morrow, Lallie Joy?" "Had to dress me up to go to the store and get a new hat."
Nancy, as has been intimated before, had a kind of tendency to reform things that appeared to her lacking in any way, and she had early seized upon the stolid Lallie Joy as a worthy object. "There she comes!" said Nancy. "She carries two quarts of milk in one hand and two pounds of butter in the other, exactly as if she was bending under the weight of a load of hay.
Lallie Joy's real moody like me; I s'pose it's only natural, livin' with a father who never sees anything but good, no matter which way he looks. There's two things I trust I shan't hear any more when I git to heaven, that's 'Cheer up Maria! an' 'It's all for the best! As for Mr.
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