Homepage
Login
Profile
BookClubs
dmBox
Read this ebook for free! No credit card needed, absolutely nothing to pay.
Words: 57437 in 26 pages
This is an ebook sharing website. You can read the uploaded ebooks for free here. No credit cards needed, nothing to pay. If you want to own a digital copy of the ebook, or want to read offline with your favorite ebook-reader, then you can choose to buy and download the ebook.
CHAPTER
On an October day--a sunny day, and except for the yellow leaves that quivered on rapidly bearing branches, very like spring--Patricia Everett, from the window of her home, watched an automobile drive out of sight, carrying her mother and sister away to Florida, and confided to the empty room that she was the very unhappiest girl in the whole world!
Conflicting emotions tormented the soul of the little lady. She disliked very much seeing anyone depart from anywhere without her! Then, too, so hurried had been the departure that nothing in the shape of candy, books or toys had been left behind to comfort her! And saddest of all, at the last moment her mother had decided that she must not return to Miss Prindle's because of an epidemic of measles!
The curious quiet that had fallen upon the house after the bustle of departure added to Patricia's loneliness. With a heart bursting with pity for herself, she wandered up the stairs to her room--a pretty room, its windows hung in flowered chintz, a bird singing from a cage hanging in the sunshine.
When his little mistress walked into the room Peter Pan trilled more gayly than before--it was as though he bade her come to the window and look across the way!
If she had looked she would have seen in the kitchen window of the shabby brick house, across the intersecting street, Mrs. Mary Quinn and her daughter Sheila rocking in one another's arms and laughing like two children!
Mrs. Quinn's house was old and shabby, its fences tumbling down; hard times often knocked at her door, but with it all her smile was always as bright as the gay geraniums blooming on the spotless sill of the kitchen window that faced the Everett house.
Fortune had come to the Quinns that day in the guise of a new lodger. He had taken the second floor bedroom which stretched across the back of the house. Because this room was very big and had a queer, rickety stairway leading to it from the outside of the house, it had never been rented. But with the other lodgers who lived in the front rooms and the tiny side bedroom and the parlor, which had been converted into a "light housekeeping suite," Mrs. Quinn managed to keep her little family most comfortably and to have a bit left over for such luxuries as the flowers, a few books, pretty pictures and crisp muslin curtains.
"Faith, Sheila," she had cried, coming into the kitchen where her daughter was preparing apples for the oven. "It's just as though Dame Fortune knew it was your birthday! Now you shall have your music!"
Then these two, arms around one another, the bowl tipping dangerously between them, laughed together as though there had never been a single hardship in the world.
"We're two sillies--that's what we are! Now we must be about our work or the gentleman will come and the room won't be ready!"
"Who is he, mother?"
Free books android app tbrJar TBR JAR Read Free books online gutenberg
(0)More posts by @FreeBooks
