Blue Robin, the Girl Pioneer — Part 139

“Well, I wish she was then,” said the child, for she was but that, dropping her arms from Nathalie’s neck and lying back with sudden exhaustion.

“Oh, she is going to faint,” cried dismayed Nathalie, while the mother rushed to the dresser for the smelling salts. But when she attempted to hold the bottle to Nita’s nose, she pushed her mother’s hand away crying, “Take that horrid thing away, and get out of the room; I want Nathalie to myself!”

And the Mystic, the woman always shrouded in gray, who looked at her neighbors with a cold, formal stare of aversion, meekly obeyed. She went softly out of the room and closed the door after her in obedience to her daughter’s sharp cry, “Do you hear? Shut the door!”

Something within Nathalie burst its bounds, she could not sit there another minute and hear the girl talk like that to her mother. “Oh, don’t speak to your mother like that, she is so good to you!” the girl’s voice trembled.

“How do you know she is good?” retorted Nita, after a short pause of surprise at this merited rebuke.

“Why—why—because her face shows it,” stammered Nathalie, “and then, why she is your mother, and if I should talk to my mother like that, why—I should expect her to die then and there.”

“Because it would hurt her so,—” Nathalie labored, she hated to preach—“to think I could be so disrespectful to her, and ill-bred.”

“Well, your mother isn’t my mother; your mother didn’t shut you up in a dark room so that you tried to get away.”

“Nita!” came in a pain-stricken voice, “don’t talk that way!”

Nathalie turned to see Mrs. Van Vorst standing in the doorway, her face drawn and lined. “I was coming in to ask—oh, Miss Page, will you come in here a moment? I should like to speak to you.”

Nathalie arose quickly, her heart overflowing with pity for this poor mother who was only too surely paying the penalty of neglect and anger. “Oh, Mrs. Van Vorst,” she cried hastily, “do not mind your daughter, she doesn’t mean to hurt you, she—I think she is just spoiled, you know.”

By this time Nathalie had followed Mrs. Van Vorst into the adjoining room, a sun-parlor, whose glass windows looked down upon a terraced garden, green with trees and gorgeous with multicolored flowers, surrounded by low rolling hillocks or mounds.