Jane of Lantern Hill Read Online Free PDF Page A

which Aunt Sylvia had given her the Christmas she was seven but it was so flawless and well-dressed that it never needed to have anything done for it and Jane had never loved it. She would have loved better a teddy bear that needed a new patch every day.
    She took Jody, wide-eyed and enraptured, through the splendors of 60 Gay and gave her the doll, which had reposed undisturbed for a long time in the lower drawer of the huge black wardrobe in Jane’s room. Then she had taken her into mother’s room to show her the things on mother’s table…the silver-backed brushes, the perfume bottles with the cut-glass stoppers that made rainbows, the wonderful rings on the little gold tray. Grandmother found them there.
    She stood in the doorway and looked at them. You could feel the silence spreading through the room like a cold, smothering wave.
    â€œWhat does this mean, Victoria…if I am allowed to ask?”
    â€œThis is…Jody,” faltered Jane. “I brought her over to give her my doll. She hasn’t any.”
    â€œIndeed? And you have given her the one your Aunt Sylvia gave you?”
    Jane at once realized that she had done something quite unpardonable. It had never occurred to her that she was not at liberty to give away her own doll.
    â€œI have not,” said grandmother, “forbidden you to play with this…this Jody in her own lot. What is in the blood is bound to come out sooner or later. But…if you don’t mind…please don’t bring your riffraff here, my dear Victoria.”
    Her dear Victoria got herself and poor hurt Jody away as best she could, leaving the doll behind them. But grandmother did not get off scot-free for all that. For the first time the worm turned. Jane paused for a moment before she went out of the door and looked straight at grandmother with intent, judging brown eyes.
    â€œYou are not fair,” she said. Her voice trembled a little but she felt she had to say it, no matter how impertinent grandmother thought her. Then she followed Jody down and out with a strange feeling of satisfaction in her heart.
    â€œI ain’t riffraff,” said Jody, her lips quivering. “Of course I’m not like you…Miss West says you’re people but my folks were respectable. Cousin Millie told me so. She said they always paid their way while they were alive. And I work hard enough for Miss West to pay my way.”
    â€œYou aren’t riffraff and I love you,” said Jane. “You and mother are the only people in the whole world I love.”
    Even as she said it, a queer little pang wrung Jane’s heart. It suddenly occurred to her that two people out of all the millions in the world…Jane never could remember the exact number of millions, but she knew it was enormous…were very few to love.
    â€œAnd I like loving people,” thought Jane. “It’s nice .”
    â€œI don’t love anybody but you,” said Jody, who forgot her hurt feelings as soon as Jane got her interested in building a castle out of all the old tin cans in the corner of the yard. Miss West hoarded her tin cans for a country cousin who made some mysterious use of them. He had not been in all winter, and there were enough cans to build a towering structure. Dick kicked it down next day, of course, but they had had the fun of building it. They never knew that Mr. Torrey, one of the 58 boarders who was a budding architect, saw the castle, gleaming in the moonlight, when he was putting his car in the garage and whistled over it.
    â€œThat’s rather an amazing thing for those two kids to build,” he said.
    Jane, who should have been asleep, was lying wide awake that very moment, going on with the story of her life in the moon, which she could see through her window.
    Jane’s “moon secret,” as she called it, was the one thing she hadn’t shared with mother and Jody. She couldn’t, somehow. It was her very