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Where do you live?" "Nowhere." "Nowhere! Why, you can't do that everybody lives somewhere," asserted Pollyanna. "Well, I don't just now. I'm huntin' up a new place." "Oh! Where is it?" The boy regarded her with scornful eyes. "Silly! As if I'd be a-huntin' for it if I knew!" Pollyanna tossed her head a little. This was not a nice boy, and she did not like to be called "silly."
Then he added whimsically: "You don't know, of course; but that little girl is better than a six-quart bottle of tonic any day. If anything or anybody can take the grouch out of Pendleton this afternoon, she can. That's why I sent her in." "Who is she?" For one brief moment the doctor hesitated. "She's the niece of one of our best known residents. Her name is Pollyanna Whittier.
"I know; but, you see, dear, never before had the other man WANTED her mother," sighed Pollyanna, her face puckered into an anxious frown. "Very well, I'll go back to Boston, of course," acceded Jimmy reluctantly. "But you needn't think I've given up because I haven't.
To Pollyanna, a minute later, she cried joyously: "And won't ye jest be listenin' ter this, Miss Pollyanna. You're ter sleep down-stairs in the room straight under this. You are you are!" Pollyanna actually grew white. "You mean why, Nancy, not really really and truly?"
But, in spite of everybody's very evident efforts to act as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, nobody really succeeded in doing so. Pollyanna, Jamie, and Jimmy overdid their gayety a bit, perhaps; and the others, while not knowing exactly what had happened, very evidently felt that something was not quite right, though they plainly tried to hide the fact that they did feel so.
"There, that's all she says about them," announced Pollyanna, folding up the closely-written sheets in her hands. "But isn't that interesting?" "Indeed it is!" There was a ring of genuineness in Jimmy's voice now. Jimmy was thinking suddenly of what his own good legs meant to him.
She stopped with a glad little cry, but she had not said a dozen words before from somewhere came a young woman with hurrying steps and a disapproving voice; a young woman who held out her hand to the small girl, and said sharply: "Here, Gladys, Gladys, come away with me. Hasn't mama told you not to talk to strange children?" "But I'm not strange children," explained Pollyanna in eager defense.
Aunt Polly had occasion a good many times before six o'clock that night to gaze at Pollyanna with surprised and questioning eyes. Nothing was right with Pollyanna. The fire would not burn, the wind blew one particular blind loose three times, and still a third leak was discovered in the roof.
"And it's glad that I am ter get rid of it," Nancy had declared in private afterwards to Pollyanna; "though it's a shame ter be tuckin' the job off on ter you, poor lamb, so it is, it is!" "But I'd love to do it, Nancy." "Well, you won't after you've done it once," predicted Nancy, sourly. "Why not?" "Because nobody does.
Much as she knew she would miss them, Pollyanna drew an actual sigh of relief as the train bearing them away rolled out of the Beldingsville station. Pollyanna would not have admitted having this feeling of relief to any one else, and even to herself she apologized in her thoughts.
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