“Oh, do you think they carried him to a hospital?”

“They took him somewhere where he was taken care of, or he would not be coming home on the noon train,” said Mrs. Anderson.  “It is almost time for you to get up, and I want you to drink another cup of coffee.  You came here without any hat, didn’t you, poor child?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I haven’t got any hat, and you can’t wear one of my bonnets, but I have a pretty white head-tie that you can wear; and nobody will see you in the closed carriage, anyway.”

“I am making so much trouble,” said Charlotte.

“You precious child!” said Mrs. Anderson; “when I think of you all alone in that house!”

“It was dreadful,” Charlotte said, with a shudder.  “I suppose there was nothing at all to be afraid of, but I imagined all kinds of things.”

“The things people imagine are more to be afraid of than the things they see, sometimes,” Mrs. Anderson said, wisely.  “Now, I think perhaps you had better get up, dear, and you must drink another cup of coffee.  I think there will be just about time enough for you to drink it and get dressed before the carriage comes.”

Mrs. Anderson took the pride in assisting the girl to dress that she had done in dressing her son when he was a child.  She even noticed, with the tenderest commiseration instead of condemnation, that the lace on her undergarments was torn, and that there were buttons missing.

“Poor dear child, she never had any decent training,” she said to herself.  She anticipated teaching Charlotte to take care of her clothes, as she might have done if she had been her own girl baby.  “I guess her clothes won’t look like this when I have had her awhile,” she said to herself, eying furtively some torn lace on the girl’s slender white shoulder.

When they were at last driving through the streets of Banbridge, she felt unspeakably proud, and also a little defiant.

“I suppose there are plenty of people who will say Randolph is a fool to marry a girl whose father has done the way hers has,” she told herself, “but I don’t care.  There isn’t a girl in Banbridge to compare with her.  I don’t care; they can say what they want to.”  She was so excited that she had put on her bonnet, which had a little jet aigrette on top, awry.  After a while Charlotte timidly ventured to speak of it and straighten it, and the tenderest thrill of delight came over the older woman at the daughterly attention.

She told Randolph that noon, after she had got home, that she was really surprised to see how well the poor child, with no training at all, had kept the house, and she said it, remembering quite distinctly a white shade of dust in full view on the parlor-table.

“Her dinner was all dried up, of course,” she said, “but I thought it looked as if it might have been quite nice when it was first cooked.”