“Eleanor looks just like Miss Morning-Glory,” Cassy whispered as her mother tucked her in bed.
“Rock Hardy is the splendidest boy I ever saw,” Jerry confided to her, and his mother gave him a kiss assuring him that no boy could be dearer than hers no matter how splendid he was. Jerry had worked hard to earn his holiday, and he had proudly poured his earnings, sixty cents, into his mother’s lap when he came home from market that Saturday morning. Both the children were very tired from the events of the day and they fell asleep so soon and slept so soundly that they did not hear a tap at the door and a voice inquiring for Mrs. Law, neither did they see Mr. and Mrs. Dallas enter, nor hear the long conversation that followed.
They would have been surprised to hear their mother tell all the details of their father’s accident, for she did not like to talk of it, and they would have wondered to see Mr. Dallas from time to time, jot down something in a little note-book. And Cassy did not know that it was not Miss Morning-Glory who kissed her as she dreamed, but that it was Mrs. Dallas who leaned over the bed to see the sleeping child still holding a violet in her moist hand, a little limp violet now, but still a sweet one. Nor did she know that Mrs. Dallas handed her mother two cunning baskets as she left the room, and that Mr. Dallas set down something in the corner of the room when he came in.
Yet she had pleasant dreams, and the first thing when she woke in the morning she remembered that it was Easter Day, and then she sat up in bed very wide awake. They would have eggs for breakfast, and they would have biscuits; she smelled them baking.
She popped up out of bed and looked towards the window where the sun came streaming in; then she gave a glad cry and her bare feet pattered across the floor, for, standing by the side of her treasured geranium and casting it quite in the shade, was a tall white lily, and on the other side a pot of pansies. Cassy clasped her hands and stood on tiptoe to reach the tall lily.
“Oh, angel lily, angel lily, where did you come from?” she cried.
“Why, daughter, don’t you know it is Easter Day?” said her mother, watching her delight with a pleased smile.
“Yes, but we never, never had a lily before. Did father send it?”
Her mother’s eyes grew moist.
“Perhaps he did,” she answered, softly. Then after a silence, “Mrs. Dallas brought it and the pansies last night, the lily for you and the pansies for Jerry.”