Pollyanna: The First Glad Book. Pollyanna Grows Up: The Second Glad Book / Поллианна. Поллианна вырастает

Her fingers, stiff from their tight clutch upon the keys, were anything but skilful in their efforts to turn the bolt in the lock; but at last the heavy, carved door swung slowly back on its hinges.

Pollyanna caught her breath. In spite of her feeling of haste, she paused a moment and looked fearfully through the vestibule to the wide, sombre hall beyond, her thoughts in a whirl. This was John Pendleton’s house; the house of mystery; the house into which no one but its master entered; the house which sheltered, somewhere-a skeleton.

Yet she, Pollyanna, was expected to enter alone these fearsome rooms, and telephone the doctor that the master of the house lay now-

With a little cry Pollyanna, looking neither to the right nor the left, fairly ran through the hall to the door at the end and opened it.

The room was large, and sombre with dark woods and hangings like the hall; but through the west window the sun threw a long shaft of gold across the floor, gleamed dully on the tarnished brass andirons in the fireplace, and touched the nickel of the telephone on the great desk in the middle of the room.

It was toward this desk that Pollyanna hurriedly tiptoed.

The telephone card was not on its hook; it was on the floor. But Pollyanna found it, and ran her shaking forefinger down through the C’s to “Chilton.” In due time she had Dr. Chilton himself at the other end of the wires, and was tremblingly delivering her message and answering the doctor’s terse, pertinent questions.

This done, she hung up the receiver and drew a long breath of relief.

Only a brief glance did Pollyanna give about her; then, with a confused vision in her eyes of crimson draperies, book-lined walls, a littered floor, an untidy desk, innumerable closed doors (any one of which might conceal a skeleton), and everywhere dust, dust, dust, she fled back through the hall to the great carved door, still half open as she had left it.

In what seemed, even to the injured man, an incredibly short time, Pollyanna was back in the woods at the man’s side.

“Well, what is the trouble? Couldn’t you get in?” he demanded.

Pollyanna opened wide her eyes.

“Why, of course I could! I’m HERE,” she answered. “As if I’d be here if I hadn’t got in! And the doctor will be right up just as soon as possible with the men and things. He said he knew just where you were, so I didn’t stay to show him. I wanted to be with you.