Next day Dolly wakes up crying for her papa. It is not the ship any
more. Everything is quite still, and her crib does not rock up and down.
'I sought he would be here,' said poor little Dolly, in a croaking,
waking voice, sitting up with crumpled curls and bright warm cheeks. It
is not her papa, but Aunt Sarah, who takes her up and kisses her, and
tries to comfort her, while the ayah, Nun Comee, who has been lying on
the floor, jumps up and dances in her flowing white garment and snaps
her black fingers, and George brings three tops to spin all at once.
Dolly is interested, and ceases crying and begins to smile and to show
all her little white teeth.
Lady Sarah rarely smiled. She used to frown so as not to show what she
felt. But Dolly from the first day had seemed to understand her; she was
never afraid of her; and she used to jump on her knee and make her
welcome to the nursery.
'_Is_ you very pretty?' said little Dolly one day, looking at the grim
face with the long nose and pinched lips. 'I think you is a very ugly
aunt.' And she smiled up in the ugly aunt's face.
'O Dolly! how naughty!' said Rhoda, who happened to be in Dolly's
nursery.
Rhoda was a little waif _protegee_, of Lady Sarah's. She came from the
curate's home close by, and was often sent in to play with Dolly, who
would be lonely, her aunt thought, without a companion of her own age;
Rhoda was Mr. Morgan's niece, and a timid little thing; she was very
much afraid at first of Dolly; so she was of the ayah, with her brown
face and earrings and monkey hands; but soon the ayah went back to India
with silver pins in her ears, taking back many messages to the poor
child-bereft parents, with a pair of Dolly's shoes, as a remembrance,
and a couple of dolls for herself as a token of good-will from her young
mistress. They were for her brothers, Nun Comee said, but it was
supposed that she intended to worship them on her return to her native
land.
The ayah being gone, little Rhoda soon ceased to be afraid of Dolly, the
kind, merry, helpful little playmate, who remained behind, frisking
along the passages and up and down the landing-places of Church House.
She was much nicer, Rhoda thought, than her own real cousins the Morgans
in Old Street.
As days go by, Dolly's pictures warm and brighten from early spring into
summer-time. By degrees they reach above the table and over and beyond
the garden roller. They are chiefly of the old garden, whose brick walls
seem to enclose sunshine and gaudy flowers all the summer through; of
the great Kensington parks, where in due season chestnuts are to be
found shining among the leaves and dry grasses; of the pond, where the
ducks are flapping and diving; of the house, which was little Rhoda's
home. This was the great bare house in Old Street, with plenty of noise,
dried herbs, content, children without end, and thick bread-and-butter.
There was also cold stalled ox on Sundays at one.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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