Page:Cornelia Meigs--The Pool of Stars.djvu/52

 deal, she exclaimed, she expostulated, she persuaded, until her niece was at the point of exhaustion.

"But it will be so dreary, all by yourself!" she kept insisting, in answer to which Betsey continued to maintain stoutly—

"Miss Miranda is going to be a good friend to me. I will not be entirely alone."

"Do you mean Miranda Reynolds who lives on the hill, up Somerset Lane?" Aunt Susan inquired. "I am very fond of her myself, but somehow I never seem to see much of her nowadays. How do you happen to know her?"

"She came to see me, but I was a long time in going there to return her visit. I did not know how nice her house was, or how kind she would be, or what interesting things she would tell me."

"I do not suppose," returned Aunt Susan slowly, with a shade of curiosity in her voice, "that she told you how she happens to be living in a gardener's cottage and cooking and scrubbing and tending cabbages and ducks when she might be doing—oh, very different things?" "No," answered Betsey, "no, she did not tell me that."

Now that she thought of it, there were a great many things that Miss Miranda had not told her. She knew very little of her new friend and, in spite of questionings among acquaintances of her own