Miss Primrose: A Novel

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Miss Primrose, by Roy Rolfe Gilson
Copyright, 1906, by Harper & Brothers. All rights reserved. Published March, 1906.

ll little, white-haired, smiling ladies remind me of Letitia—Letitia Primrose, whom you saw just now in a corner of our garden among the petunias. You thought her odd, no doubt, not knowing her as I or as the children do who find her dough-nuts sweet after school is done, or their English cousins, those little brown-feathered beggars waiting on winter mornings in the snow-drifts at her sill. As for myself, I must own to a certain kinship, as it were, not of blood but of propinquity, a long next-doorhood in our youth, a tenderer, nameless tie in after years, and always a fond partiality which began one day by our old green fence. There, on its Primrose side, it seems, she had parted the grape-vines, looking for fruit, and found instead—
Why! whose little boy is this?
Now, it happened to be Bertram, Jonathan Weatherby's little boy—it being a holiday, and two pickets off, and the Concords purple in a witchery of September sheen—though at first he could make no sign to her of his parentage, so surprised he was, and his mouth so crammed.
Will I die? he asked, when he had gulped down all but his tongue.
Die! she replied, laughing at his grave, round eyes and pinching his nearer cheek. Do I look like an ogress?
No, he said; but I've gone and swallowed 'em.
The grapes?
No—yes—but I mean the pits, whereat she laughed so that his brow darkened.
Well, a man did once.