Page:Carroll Rankin--Dandelion Cottage.djvu/150

 128  a comfort proud Mrs. Crane had found it to have her warm-hearted little friends stand between her poverty and the sometimes-too-prying eyes of a grown-up world.

Unobservant as they had seemed, the girls did not forget about the Mother-Hubbard-like state of Mrs. Crane's cupboard. After that one of their finest castles in Spain always had Mrs. Crane, who would have made such a delightful mother and who had never had any children, enthroned as its gracious mistress. When they had time to think about it at all, it always grieved them to think of their generous natured, no-longer-young friend dreading a poverty-stricken, loveless and perhaps homeless old age, for that, they had discovered, was precisely what Mrs. Crane was doing.

"If she were a little, thin, active old lady, with bobbing white curls like Grandma Pike," said Jean, "lots of people would have a corner for her; but poor Mrs. Crane takes up so much room and is so heavy and slow