“No; thank you, Jim,” replied Eva.

Suddenly the young man reached out a hand and stroked her rough hair.  “Well, take care of yourself, old girl,” he said.

Eva went to her sister as Jim went out of the yard.  Ellen was in the sitting-room with her father, and Fanny had gone to the kitchen to heat some milk for the child, whom she firmly believed to have had nothing to eat during her absence.

“Fanny,” said Eva.

“Well?” said Fanny.  “I can’t stop; I must get some milk for her; she must be ’most starved.”

Fanny turned and looked at Eva, who cast down her eyes before her in a very shamefacedness of happiness and contrition.

“Why, what is it?” repeated Fanny, staring at her.

“I’ve got Jim back, I guess, as well as Ellen,” said Eva, “and I’m going to be a good woman.”

After all the crowd of people outside had gone, the little nervous boy raced into the Brewster yard with a tin cup of chestnuts in his hand.  He knocked at the side door, and when Fanny opened it he thrust them upon her.  “They’re for her!” he blurted out, and was gone, racing like a deer.

“Don’t you want the cup back?” Fanny shouted after him.

“No, ma’am,” he called back, and that, although his mother had charged him to bring back the cup or he would get a scolding.

Chapter VII

Ellen had clung fast all the time to her doll, her bunch of pinks, and her cup and saucer; or, rather, she had guarded them jealously.  “Where did you get all these things?” her aunt Eva had asked her, amazedly, when she first caught sight of her, and then had not waited for an answer in her wild excitement of joy at the recovery of the child.  The great, smiling wax doll had ridden between Jim and Eva in the buggy, Eva had held the pink cup and saucer with a kind of mechanical carefulness, and Ellen herself clutched the pinks in one little hand, though she crushed them against her aunt’s bosom as she sat in her lap.  Ellen’s grandmother and aunt had glanced at these treasures with momentary astonishment, and so had her mother, but curiosity was in abeyance for both of them for the time; rapture at the sight of the beloved child at whose loss they had suffered such agonies was the one emotion of their souls.  But later investigation was to follow.

When Ellen did not seem to care for her hot milk liberally sweetened in her own mug, and griddle-cakes with plenty of syrup, her mother looked at her, and her eyes of love sharpened with inquiry.  “Ain’t you hungry?” she said.  Ellen shook her head.  She was sitting at the table in the dining-room, and her father, mother, and aunt were all hovering about her, watching her.  Some of the neighbor women were also in the room, staring with a sort of deprecating tenderness of curiosity.

“Do you feel sick?” Ellen’s father inquired, anxiously.

“You don’t feel sick, do you?” repeated her mother.