Mrs. Carew was very angry. 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. Mrs. Carew was not in
the habit of having her invitations ignored, or her wishes scorned.
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. 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?"

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. 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."

But she did not forget all about it. However insistently she might
disclaim responsibility and relationship, just as insistently
responsibility and relationship 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.

Then, too, there was Pollyanna. Clearly Pollyanna was not herself at
all. In a most unPollyanna-like spirit she moped about the house,
finding apparently no interest anywhere.