Azalea got away somehow, her heart dancing with gratitude. Jim followed. They were late, and they ran along the uneven, shady road. Pa and Ma McBirney were already at the “Old Green Place,” a little tired of waiting but very good-natured notwithstanding. So, since everything was going well it seemed a little odd that Azalea should put her head down in Ma McBirney’s lap and softly weep. Never did Azalea love this dear woman more than when she found that she was to be allowed to weep if she liked without being asked why. Mary McBirney stroked the soft hair and said nothing—was most careful in fact, not to call the attention of Jim and his father to her outburst. At last Azalea lifted her face, tear-stained and smiling. “I’ve been so happy,” she whispered. “When we get home I’ll tell you all about it. Everything seems different.” Jim had been rattling on to his father on the front seat, and Mrs. McBirney, who had managed to catch a part of what he was saying, had some idea of why the world seemed different. She, herself, thought that Azalea, the daughter of the wandering show woman, was really meant for a beautiful life like that of the Carson’s, rather than a life of work and poverty and hardship like her own. “But I’ll give her what I can,” she thought. “I’ll give her love.” CHAPTER VI GROWING PAINS That night Mary McBirney carried the candle up to the loft for Azalea and sat beside her while she undressed. “I reckon you feel a little upset, honey,” she said in her gentle, motherly way. “You saw them grand folks with their fine ways, and beautiful home, and nice clothes, and it made you feel you wasn’t nobody. I know just how you feel. I was born up Blue River Valley way, and till I was fifteen I didn’t see nobody but folks of the same kind as mine. Then two ladies came driving through our country, writing up us mountain people, and telling all about the mountains and what trees and flowers was on ’em, and they asked me to go along to do the cooking for them, and shake down their beds for ’em and all that. So I went, and set up on the front seat of the carriage with the driver, and I heard all they had to say, and watched their way of doing things. Well, it set me back some. I found out that what I knew wouldn’t fill the thimble point of their knowing. They was wearing rough clothing for camping, but if I tried all my days I couldn’t make clothes look like that. I wouldn’t know how to buy them if I had the money. Me, I just did things anyhow, to get them done, but they had a right way for everything and rules about how to act in every kind of case. At first I tried to catch on to their ways, but at last I saw it was going to be too much for me, and I just settled down to be content in my own way with my own kind of folks. But my pillow was wet many a night, honey. Growing pains, they were. You’re having them now.” “And so is Jim, I s’pose,” sighed the girl. “I s’pose he feels the same way—all mixed up.”