"AnnieHamiltonDonnell-RebeccaMary" - читать интересную книгу автора (Donnell Annie Hamilton)

her duty is. Rebecca Mary might listen to the minister. All she's
got to do is to take just one stitch to show her submission. It
won't take but an instant. I've got supper all out on the kitchen
table--I don't care if it's ten o'clock at night!"

"It isn't a case for the minister. It's a case for the Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Children!" fumed the minister's kind
little wife inwardly. And she stole away in the twilight to deal
with little Rebecca Mary herself. She came back to the minister by
and by, red-eyed and fierce.

"You needn't go over; I've been. It won't do any good, Robert.
That poor, stiff-willed, set little thing is starving by inches!"

"I think her aunt is, too!"

"Well, perhaps--I can't help it, Robert, perhaps the--aunt--ought--to."

"My dear!--Felicia!"

"I told you I couldn't help it. She is so hungry, Robert! If you
had seen her--What do you think she was doing when I got there?"

"Crying?"

"Crying! She was laughing. _I_ cried. She sat there under some
grapevines watching a great white rooster eat his supper. His name,
I think, is Thomas Jefferson."

"Yes, Thomas Jefferson," agreed the minister, with the assurance of
acquaintance. For Thomas Jefferson was one of his parishioners.

"Well, she was laughing at him in the shakiest, hungriest little voice
you ever heard. 'Is it good?' she says. 'It LOOKS good.' He was
eating raw corn. 'If I could, I'd eat supper with you when you're
VERY hungry, you don't mind eating things raw.' Then she saw me."

"Well?"

"Well, I coaxed her, Robert. It didn't do any good. Tomorrow
somebody must go there and interfere."

"She must be a remarkably strange child," the minister mused.
He was thinking of the holding-out powers of the three children he
had a half-ownership in.

"I don't think Rebecca Mary IS a child, Robert. She must be fifty
years old, at the least. She and her aunt are about the same age.
Perhaps if her mother had lived, or she hadn't made so many sheets,
or learned to knit and darn and cook--" The minister's kind little