"Forty is comparatively young, Sally!" Miss Pond, who was looking regretfully back upon forty herself, said rather tartly. "But let me hurry on. She gave poverty and illness as her reasons for asking the state to take care of you. She said your father was dead."
"Oh, poor mother!" A shadow flitted across Sally's delicate face; quick tears for the dead father and the ill, poverty-stricken mother filmed her blue eyes.
"The state accepted you provisionally, and shortly afterward sent an investigator to check up on her story," Miss Pond went on. "The investigator found that the woman, Mrs. Ford, had left the city--it was Stanton, thirty miles from here--and that no one knew where she had gone. From that day to this we have had no word from the woman who brought you here. She was a mystery in Stanton, and has remained a mystery until now. I'm sorry, Sally, that I can't tell you more."
"Oh!" Sally's sharp cry was charged with such pain and disappointment that Miss Pond took one of the little clenched fists between her own thin hands, not noticing that the slip of paper fluttered to the floor. "She didn't write to know how I was, didn't care whether I lived or died! I wish I hadn't asked! I thought maybe there was somebody, someone who loved me--"
"Remember she was sick and poor, Sally. Maybe she went to a hospital suddenly and--and died. But there was no report in any papers of the state of her death," Miss Pond added conscientiously. "You mustn't grieve, Sally. You're nearly grown up. You'll be leaving us when you're eighteen, unless you want to stay on as an assistant matron or as a teacher--"
"Oh, no, no!" Sally cried. "I--I'll pack now, Miss Pond. And thank you a million times for telling me, even if it did hurt."
In her distress Miss Pond trotted out of the locker-room without a thought for the bit of paper on which she had scribbled the memorandum of Sally's pitifully meager life history. But Sally had not forgotten it. She snatched it from the floor and pinned it to her "body waist," a vague resolution forming in her troubled heart.
When five o'clock came Sally Ford was waiting in the office for Clem Carson, her downcast eyes fixed steadily upon the small brown paper parcel in her lap, color staining her neck and cheeks and brow, for Mrs. Stone, stiffly, awkwardly but conscientiously, was doing her institutional best to arm the state's charge for her first foray into the outside world.