Page 32 - pollyanna

at once to learn to be punctual. When she comes down she
may have bread and milk in the kitchen.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ It was well, perhaps, that Miss Polly did not
happen to be looking at Nancy’s face just then.
At the earliest possible moment after supper, Nancy crept
up the back stairs and thence to the attic room.
‘Bread and milk, indeed!—and when the poor lamb
hain’t only just cried herself to sleep,’ she was muttering
fiercely, as she softly pushed open the door. The next mo-
ment she gave a frightened cry. ‘Where are you? Where’ve
you gone? Where HAVE you gone?’ she panted, looking in
the closet, under the bed, and even in the trunk and down
the water pitcher. Then she flew down-stairs and out to Old
Tom in the garden.
‘Mr. Tom, Mr. Tom, that blessed child’s gone,’ she wailed.
‘She’s vanished right up into Heaven where she come from,
poor lamb—and me told ter give her bread and milk in the
kitchen—her what’s eatin’ angel food this minute, I’ll war-
rant, I’ll warrant!’
The old man straightened up.
‘Gone? Heaven?’ he repeated stupidly, unconsciously
sweeping the brilliant sunset sky with his gaze. He stopped,
stared a moment intently, then turned with a slow grin.
‘Well, Nancy, it do look like as if she’d tried ter get as nigh
Heaven as she could, and that’s a fact,’ he agreed, pointing
with a crooked finger to where, sharply outlined against the
reddening sky, a slender, wind-blown figure was poised on
top of a huge rock.
‘Well, she ain’t goin’ ter Heaven that way ter-night—not

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