"Beg pahdon, Miss Betty, but it do concern. Didn't Ah done go promise yo' dyin' ma how't Ah't take ca' of you-all what'd nevah no sense to take ca' yo'self? Huh! Yo' put dat shawl closeter 'roun' dem purty shouldahs o' yo's, whilst I go shame dat cook for sendin' up such no-'count aigs to my young miss!" And away limped Dinah, the "misery" in her own limbs from her "roomaticals" being very severe.
Meanwhile, in the little house around the corner, Mrs. John Chester was superintending another breakfast which had the delightful zest of novelty about it. No sooner had Dorothy C. been taken within doors than she espied the table which John-postman had so hastily quitted upon sound of her own laughter and, at once, began to kick and squirm in the house mistress's arms with such vigor that the good lady came near to dropping her, and exclaimed, in mingled fear and pride:
"Why, you strong little thing! You're as hard to hold as – as a human eel! There, there, don't! You've slipped down so far all your clothes are over your head. Are you hungry? Well, well! You shall have all you want to eat, for once!"
Then she placed the child on the floor while she filled a tumbler with milk and offered it; but this was met by disdain and such another swift toss of the baby arm that the glass flew out of the holder's hand, and its contents deluged the floor.
Whereupon, Miss Dorothy C. threw herself backward with shrieks which might mean anger or delight, but were equally confusing to the order-loving Mrs. Chester, who cried, in reproof:
"Oh! you naughty baby! Whoever you belong to should teach you better than that! Now, just see. All my nice clean matting splashed with milk, and milk-grease is hard to get out. Now you lie there till I get a pail and cloth – if you hurt yourself I can't help it. John said you were a joke, but you're no joke to me!"
Having just finished her spring cleaning and having had, for economy's sake, to do it all herself, the housewife's tidy soul was doubly tried, and she had a momentary desire to put the baby and her wagon out upon the street again, to take its chances with somebody else. However, when she re-entered with her pail and cloths, she was instantly diverted by the sight that met her.
Dorothy C. had managed to pull her coat over her head and in some unknown fashion twist the strings of her bonnet around her throat, in an effort to remove the objectionable headgear. The result was disaster. The more she pulled the tighter grew that band around her neck and her face was already blue from choking when Mrs. Chester uncovered it and rescued the child from strangling.
As the lady afterward described the affair to her husband it appeared that:
"Seeing that, and her so nigh death, as it were, gave me the terriblest turn! So that, all unknown, down sits I in that puddle of milk as careless as the little one herself. And I cuddled her up that close, as if I'd comforted lots of babies before, and me a green hand at the business. To see her sweet little lip go quiver-quiver, and her big brown eyes fill with tears – Bless you, John! I was crying myself in the jerk of a lamb's tail! Then I got up, slipped off my wet skirt and got her out of her outside things, and there pinned to her dress was this note. Read it out again, please, it so sort of puzzles me."
So the postman read all that they were to learn, for many and many a day, concerning the baby which had come to their home; and this is a copy of that ill-spelled, rudely scrawled document:
"thee child Is wun Yere an too Munths old hur burthDay is aPrill Furst. til firthur notis Thar will Bee a letur in The posOfis the furst of Everi mounth with Ten doLurs. to Pay." Signed:
Now John Chester had been a postman for several years and he had learned to decipher all sorts of handwriting. Instantly, he recognized that this scrawl was in a disguised hand, wholly different from that upon the card pinned to the child's coat, and that the spelling was also incorrect from a set purpose. Laying the two bits of writing together he carefully studied them, and after a few moments' scrutiny declared:
"The same person wrote both these papers. The first one in a natural, cultivated hand, and a woman's. The second in a would-be-ignorant one, to divert suspicion. But – the writer didn't think it out far enough; else she never would have given the same odd shape to her r's and that twist to the tails of her y's. It's somebody that knows us, too, likely, though I can't for the life of me guess who. What shall we do about her? Send her to an Orphanage, ourselves? Or turn her over to the police to care for, Martha dear?"
His face was so grave that, for a moment, she believed him to be in earnest; then that sunny smile which was never long absent from his features broke over them and in that she read the answer to her own desire. To whomsoever Dorothy C. belonged, that heartless person had passed the innocent baby on to them and they might safely keep her for their own.
Only, knowing the extreme tidiness of his energetic wife, John finally cautioned:
"Don't settle it too hastily, Martha. By the snap of her brown eyes and the toss of her yellow head, I foresee there'll be a deal more spilled milk before we've done with her!"
"I don't care!" recklessly answered the housewife, "she's mine!"
CHAPTER II
A POSTAL SUBSTITUTE
So long a time had passed that Dorothy C. had grown to be what father John called "a baker's dozen of years old"; and upon another spring morning, as fair as that when she first came to them, the girl was out upon the marble steps, scrubbing away most vigorously. The task was known locally as "doing her front," and if one wishes to be considerable respectable, in Baltimore, one's "front" must be done every day. On Saturdays the entire marble facing of the basement must also be polished; but "pernickity" Mrs. Chester was known to her neighbors as such a forehanded housekeeper that she had her Saturday's work done on Friday, if this were possible.
Now this was Friday and chanced to be a school holiday; so Dorothy had been set to the week-end task, which she hated; and therefore she put all the more energy into it, the sooner to have done with it, meanwhile singing at the top of her voice. Then, when the postman came round the corner of the block, she paused in her singing to stare at him for one brief instant. The next she had pitched her voice a few notes higher still, and it was her song that greeted her father's ears and set him smiling in his old familiar fashion. Unfortunately, he had not been smiling when she first perceived him and there had been a little catch in her tones as she resumed her song. Each was trying to deceive the other and each pretending that nothing of the sort was happening.
"Heigho, my child! At it again, giving the steps a more tombstone effect? Well, since it's the fashion – go ahead!"
"I wish the man, or men, who first thought of putting scrubby-steps before people's houses had them all to clean himself! Hateful old thing!"
With a comical gesture of despair she tossed the bit of sponge-stone, with which she had been polishing, into the gutter and calmly seated herself on the bottom step, "to get her breath." "To get yours, too, father dear," she added, reaching to the postman's hand and gently drawing him down beside her. Then, because her stock of patience was always small and she could not wait for his news, she demanded: "Well! Did you go? What did he say?"
"Yes, darling, I went," he answered, in a low tone and casting an anxious glance backward over his shoulder toward the house where Martha might be near enough to hear. But having replied to one question he ignored the rest.
However, the girl was not to be put off by silence and her whole heart was in her eyes as she leaned forward and peered into his. He still tried to evade her, but she was so closely bound up with his life, she understood him so quickly and naturally, that this was difficult; so when she commanded in her tender, peremptory way: "Out with it, father mine, body and bones!" he half-cried, half-groaned:
"Worse than all the others! I – am – doomed!"
Then he dropped his head on his hands and, regardless of the fact that they were on the street, conspicuous to every passer-by, he gave way to a mute despair. Now when a naturally light-hearted person breaks down the collapse is complete, but Dorothy did not know this nor that recovery is commonly very prompt. She was still staring in grieved amazement at her father's bowed head when he again