Page:Cornelli (IA cornelli00spyr 0).pdf/146

 idea how changed the child is in all her ways. One hardly knows her any more. Three or four times a morning she used to come running in and out of the kitchen. She was always singing and flying about the garden like a little bird, at all hours of the day.

“Who picked all the fine berries and the yellow plums, the juicy, dark red cherries from the young trees over there, so that it was a pleasure to see her? Cornelli, of course! And now she won’t even look at anything. All the berries are dried up by now and spoiled, and the fine cherries, too. The yellow plums, also, are lying under the tree by the dozen. They are only meant for children; the ladies won’t bother about them and one can’t cook them, either. So they fall down and lie there, and Cornelli never raises her head when she goes by them.”

Martha was much too modest to say how she would have loved to have a little basket full of plums for her young boarder. She never could give him any fruit and she knew how he would enjoy some. But as long as he was staying with her she could not do it, for