"I remember. Mighty disagreeable, that was."
"Yes. I was in disgrace. She looked at me as if she'd been frozen. And you brought me a peach. Do you remember that peach?"
He shook his head. But he did remember, though he said nothing, his mind on the poor little girl chilled by Aunt Anne's frozen look.
"It was the most beautiful peach," said Nan, looking into the fire, and continuing to hug her knees. "It wasn't that I didn't have peaches. There were plenty to be eaten like a lady with a silver knife, or even stolen off the sideboard and gobbled in the garden with the juice squshing over your white frock. But this one—you slipped it into my hand and I knew it was because you were sorry for me. And I took it out of the room and went into the garden with it. And what do you s'pose I did then, Rookie?"
"Ate it, I hope," said Raven. He felt his eyes hot with angry sorrow over her. "That's the only thing I know of to do with a peach."
"I went round behind the lilacs, where the lily bed is, and stood there and cried like—like a water spout, I guess, and I kissed the peach. I kissed it and kissed it. It was like a rough check. And then I buried it among the lilies because the dirt there looked so soft."
"Did it come up?"
He wanted, though so late, to turn it into childish comedy. Nan laughed out.
"No," she said ruefully, "not the way you'd expect. It did come up. I saw her troweling there the next morning. She'd called me to bring her other gardening gloves. She'd found a hole in one she had on. You know how exquisitely she kept her hands. And just as I came, she turned up the peach, and looked at it as if it had done something disgraceful to get there, and tossed it into her basket."
"Now," said Raven, "you can't make me think anybody"—he couldn't allow himself to say Aunt Anne—"went hunting out your poor little peach."