You may remember that Polly had a certain inherited delicacy that used to keep her mother uneasy, and lately it had troubled her. It was this fact she had concealed from her family and friends, so that now, though she was better, her physician had scouted the idea of a return East. Once near New York he was sure she would begin to talk business with her theatrical manager, or even undertake to study a new play.
No, she must undoubtedly remain at her post a while longer. And yet was it really necessary to have her post quite so lonely?
Just as this idea occurred to her, a slight noise attracting her attention, Polly glanced down into the garden below her veranda.
There stood Bobbin and the next moment she had flung a poor little bouquet at her feet. It was a strange offering, all prickly cactus leaves with a single white flower in their midst. For some absurd reason it flashed through Polly's mind to wonder if her offering could be in any way symbolic of the girl who had given it her. Could there be something beautiful hidden within the child's peculiarities?
For this was not the first token of affection that Bobbin had presented. Indeed, many queer, small gifts had been brought to the strange lady since their first meeting, so that Polly had been curiously touched. For of course Bobbin's offerings came straight from her heart. In her pathetic, shut-in world she had no way of knowing anything of the history of the woman whom she so plainly admired.
Yet inside Polly O'Neill's sitting room at this moment there were four or five tokens of affection that must have come from her. They were too extraordinary for any one else to have sent them and had been laid at her shrine in too unusual a way. For most of them had been literally flung on her veranda. A few of them, when she happened to be sitting outdoors as she was doing at the present moment, and the others when no one had seen or known of their appearance.
One of the gifts was a beautiful blue feather that must have fallen from some unusual bird flying over the western lands, another a stone that shone like the finest crystal, in the sun, and a third a horseshoe some small broncho must have shed in trotting across the plains.