"Not me!" echoed ungrammatically Laura Ann.
While they waited and speculated mildly, and packed and repacked their things, T.O. lay on the bed in Emmeline Camp's little bedroom and winced with pain whenever she moved her wounded foot. But she was very happy. "Peace is in my soul, if not my sole!" she thought, a slave still to the punning habit. She had never been so peaceful in her life. The little old woman who had befriended her bustled happily in and out of the little bedroom. She bathed and rubbed the swollen ankle, and smiled and chattered to the girl at the other end of it. Her "lineaments" were working a cure, surely.
It had all been decided upon. The B-Hive was to be transplanted for the summer to the little, green-painted house trailed over with morning-glory vines and roses. Emmeline Camp had wanted, she said, for forty years, to go upon a long journey, to visit her brother. Here was her chance. The small sum she had at last consented to be paid for the use of her little house would pay her traveling expenses one way, at least, and John would be glad enough, she said, to pay her fare home, to get rid of her! Only she was quite able to pay it herself.
"I've kind of hankered to go to see John all these years. Forty years is quite a spell to hanker, isn't it? But I never felt like leaving the house behind, and I couldn't take it along very conveniently, so I stayed to home. And then—my dear, you can laugh as well as not, but I didn't like to leave Amelia."
"But you might have taken her with—"
"No," seriously, "I couldn't 've taken Amelia. I think, deary, it might 've killed her; she's part of the little house and the morning-glories and roses. I'd have had to leave Amelia if I'd gone, and it didn't seem right."
"But now—"
"Now," the little, old woman laughed in her odd, tender way that "went with" Amelia, "now she'll have plenty of young company—all o' you here with her. I shall make believe she's coming and going with you, and it'll be a sight of comfort. Yes, deary, I guess this is going to be my chance to visit John."
"And our chance to have a summer in the country," completed the Talented One. "Oh, I think you are—dear! Whatever will the other girls say when I tell them about you!"
One day T.O. remembered the blue pump. She gazed out of the window at the brown one in the little yard. "Who would have thought," she sighed, "that I could be so happy without a blue pump!"