There was even to be a Christ mas party, for Mrs. For the first time in many years the house was aflame and aglitter with scarlet and tinsel. Carew, spurred by a feeling that she herself only dimly understood, and recklessly determined to bring about some change in Pollyanna at all costs, ordered a huge tree, two dozen wreaths, and quantities of holly and Christmas baubles.

Some way, just as soon as I begin to eat, I think of Jamie, and how he doesn't have only old doughnuts and dry rolls and then I-I don't want anything.' Pollyanna was actually losing her appetite but here again she disclaimed sickness. It-it's only that I was thinking of Jamie, you know,-how he hasn't got all these beautiful things-carpets, and pictures, and curtains.' 'Oh, no, I'm not sick,' she would answer, when remonstrated with, and questioned. In a most unPollyanna-like spirit she moped about the house, finding apparently no interest anywhere. Clearly Pollyanna was not herself at all. However insistently she might disclaim responsibility and relationship, just as insistently responsibility and relation ship thrust themselves upon her in the shape of panicky doubts and however resolutely she turned her thoughts to other matters, just so resolutely visions of a wistful-eyed boy in a poverty-stricken room loomed always before her. Carew now very proudly told herself that she did not indeed 'care,' that he was not her sister's boy, and that she would 'forget all about it.'īut she did not forget all about it.

It certainly had not helped matters any that the boy had divined her state of mind, and had given as the reason for his refusal that she 'did not care.' To be sure, Mrs. She knew then that her true reason for wanting him had been-not because she cared for him, not even because she wished to help him and make him happy-but because she hoped, by taking him, that she would ease her own mind, and forever silence that awful eternal questioning on her part: 'What if he were her own Jamie?' Furthermore, now that she could not have the boy, she was conscious of an almost frantic terror lest he were, after all, the real Jamie.

Carew was not in the habit of having her invitations ignored, or her wishes scorned. To have brought herself to the point where she was willing to take this lame boy into her home, and then to have the lad calmly refuse to come, was unbearable.

Pollyanna and pollyanna grows up