"Should you like to live with me?" Annie asked.

The child seemed to reflect. Then she said, with the indirection of her age
and sex, pushing against Annie's knee, "I don't know what your name is."

"Have you never heard my name? It's Annie. How do you like it?"

"It's--it's too short," said the child, from her readiness always to answer
something that charmed Annie.

"Well, then you can make it longer. You can call me Aunt Annie. I think
that will be better for a little girl; don't you?"

"Mothers can whip, but aunts can't," said Idella, bringing a practical
knowledge, acquired from her observation of life Over the Track, to a
consideration of the proposed relation.

"I know _one_ aunt who won't," said Annie, touched by the reply.

Saturday evening Idella's father came for her; and with a preamble which
seemed to have been unnecessary when he understood it, Annie asked him to
let her keep the child, at least till he had settled himself in a house of
his own, or, she hinted, in some way more comfortable for Idella than he
was now living. In her anxiety to make him believe that she was not taking
too great a burden on her hands, she became slowly aware that no fear of
this had apparently troubled him, and that he was looking at the whole
matter from a point outside of questions of polite ceremonial, even of
personal feeling.