This proposition met with instant approval. It appealed to Miss Kippy as a brilliant suggestion. She assisted in unbuttoning the single straps and watched with glee as they were fastened about her wrists.
“‘Don’t leave me’”
“Now,” said Mr. Opp, with assumed enthusiasm, “we’ll make the slippers [p47] walk you up-stairs, and after Aunt Tish undresses you, they shall walk you to bed. Won’t that be fun?”
Miss Kippy’s fancy was so tickled by this suggestion that she put it into practice at once, and went gaily forth up the steps on all fours. At the turn she stopped, and looked at him wistfully:
“You’ll come up before I go to sleep?” she begged; “Daddy did.”
Half an hour later Aunt Tish came down the narrow stairway: “She done gone to baid now, laughin’ an’ happy ag’in,” she said; “she never did have dem spells when her paw was round, an’ sometimes dat chile jes as clear in her mind as you an’ me is.”
“What is it she’s afraid of?” asked Mr. Opp.
Aunt Tish leaned toward him across the table, and the light of the lamp fell full upon her black, bead-like eyes, and her sunken jaws, and on the great palpitating scar.