Miss Polly cleared her throat hurriedly.

“We’ll, she’s just been here, dear.  She left a message for you—­but she wouldn’t tell me what it meant.  She said to tell you that Mrs. Tarbell is glad now.”

Pollyanna clapped her hands softly.

“Did she say that—­really?  Oh, I’m so glad!”

“But, Pollyanna, what did she mean?”

“Why, it’s the game, and—­” Pollyanna stopped short, her fingers to her lips.

“What game?”

“N-nothing much, Aunt Polly; that is—­I can’t tell it unless I tell other things that—­that I’m not to speak of.”

It was on Miss Polly’s tongue to question her niece further; but the obvious distress on the little girl’s face stayed the words before they were uttered.

Not long after Mrs. Tarbell’s visit, the climax came.  It came in the shape of a call from a certain young woman with unnaturally pink cheeks and abnormally yellow hair; a young woman who wore high heels and cheap jewelry; a young woman whom Miss Polly knew very well by reputation—­but whom she was angrily amazed to meet beneath the roof of the Harrington homestead.

Miss Polly did not offer her hand.  She drew back, indeed, as she entered the room.

The woman rose at once.  Her eyes were very red, as if she had been crying.  Half defiantly she asked if she might, for a moment, see the little girl, Pollyanna.

Miss Polly said no.  She began to say it very sternly; but something in the woman’s pleading eyes made her add the civil explanation that no one was allowed yet to see Pollyanna.

The woman hesitated; then a little brusquely she spoke.  Her chin was still at a slightly defiant tilt.

“My name is Mrs. Payson—­Mrs. Tom Payson.  I presume you’ve heard of me—­most of the good people in the town have—­and maybe some of the things you’ve heard ain’t true.  But never mind that.  It’s about the little girl I came.  I heard about the accident, and—­and it broke me all up.  Last week I heard how she couldn’t ever walk again, and—­and I wished I could give up my two uselessly well legs for hers.  She’d do more good trotting around on ’em one hour than I could in a hundred years.  But never mind that.  Legs ain’t always given to the one who can make the best use of ’em, I notice.”

She paused, and cleared her throat; but when she resumed her voice was still husky.

“Maybe you don’t know it, but I’ve seen a good deal of that little girl of yours.  We live on the Pendleton Hill road, and she used to go by often—­only she didn’t always go by.  She came in and played with the kids and talked to me—­and my man, when he was home.  She seemed to like it, and to like us.  She didn’t know, I suspect, that her kind of folks don’t generally call on my kind.  Maybe if they did call more, Miss Harrington, there wouldn’t be so many—­of my kind,” she added, with sudden bitterness.

“Be that as it may, she came; and she didn’t do herself no harm, and she did do us good—­a lot o’ good.  How much she won’t know—­nor can’t know, I hope; ’cause if she did, she’d know other things—­that I don’t want her to know.