Pollyanna Crows up / Поллианна вырастает. Книга для чтения на английском языке

) решило исход дела], when Della Wetherby took her hurried leave half an hour later, she carried with her Ruth Carew’s promise to receive Pollyanna into her home.

“But just remember,” Mrs. Carew warned her at parting, “just remember that the minute that child begins to preach to me and to tell me to count my mercies, back she goes to you, and you may do what you please with her. I sha’n’t keep her!”

“I’ll remember – but I’m not worrying any,” nodded the younger woman, in farewell.

To herself she whispered, as she hurried away from the house: “Half my job is done. Now for the other half – to get Pollyanna to come. But she’s just got to come. I’ll write that letter so they can’t help letting her come!”

Chapter II

Some Old Friends

In Beldingsville that August day, Mrs. Chilton waited until Pollyanna had gone to bed before she spoke to her husband about the letter that had come in the morning mail.

For that matter, she would have had to wait, anyway, for crowded office hours, and the doctor’s two long drives over the hills had left no time for domestic conferences.

It was about half-past nine, indeed, when the doctor entered his wife’s sitting-room. His tired face lighted at sight of her, but at once a perplexed questioning came to his eyes.

“Why, Polly, dear, what is it?” he asked concernedly.

His wife gave a rueful laugh.

“Well, it’s a letter – though I didn’t mean you should find out by just looking at me.”

“Then you mustn’t look so I can,” he smiled. “But what is it?”

Mrs. Chilton hesitated, pursed her lips, then picked up a letter near her.

“I’ll read it to you,” she said. “It’s from a Miss Della Wetherby at Dr. Ames’ Sanatorium.”

“All right. Fire away,” directed the man, throwing himself at full length on to the couch near his wife’s chair.

But his wife did not at once “fire away.” She got up first and covered her husband’s recumbent figure with a gray worsted afghan. Mrs. Chilton’s wedding day was but a year behind her. She was forty-two now. It seemed sometimes as if into that one short year of wifehood she had tried to crowd all the loving service and “babying” that had been accumulating through twenty years of lovelessness and loneliness.