"He says he can come home day after to-morrow if he don't colapse, so
Stefana is cleaning the house and I'm helping and we can't hardly wait.
We've got a new cloesbasket Stefana's going to make bows for the
handles, tell Elly Precious.
"P. S. Pink bows."
Miss Theodosia was not impatient as she folded the little letter again. Tears stood in her eyes. She hurried back, bottleless, to Elly Precious, to tell him. That he had fallen asleep made no difference.
"You are going home day after to-morrow! Dream it in a little dream, dear. When you wake up, it will be true. They can't hardly wait and there's a new 'cloesbasket' with bows—P. S., pink bows. Oh, Elly Precious, you know you're glad to go home! You've been pretending, too!" Game little Elly Precious, to pretend! She stooped and kissed his eyes, close shut in that dream of going home. "They are cleaning the house," she whispered, "they can't hardly wait."
A prescience of awful loneliness swept over her. She saw Theodosia Baxter—lone and babyless again—set back in her empty house. The curtain had gone down—would go down day after to-morrow—on the last beautiful act.
"But I have two days left! I demand my pound—fifteen little pounds of flesh!" Elly Precious' little pink flesh. She would play that last act of the little game of make-believe. Intruders or no intruders, she would play it! At once, she began again where they had left off.
"You will have to go to college very young, dear," she said. "They are going to take you away from me day after tomorrow. A day and a half is such a little college course; you'd be such a little Freshman, Elly Precious! So we will have to give it up, dear. We'll just spend our last days together. Who wants to know Latin and Greek anyway? I'll teach you to pat little cakes in English!" Surely, surely she must have taught her first baby to pat-a-cake. The blundering little hands in hers felt strangely familiar. The first baby had been just as funny and sweet as Elly Precious at that little lesson.
"If I only had a little more time!" sighed Miss Theodosia. "There is so much left for us to do; it is cruel to hurry us so! We might—we might run away, dear! You and I. To Europe and Asia and Africa! I'd show you all the wonders of the world. Listen, Elly Precious,—the pyramids! Wouldn't you love to see the pyramids? You could play in the warm sand, anyway,—bury your little twelve toes deep! We would keep watch all the time and run when we saw Evangeline coming. We would never stop to put on our shoes and stock—Elly Precious, you've gone to sleep!" So little was he thrilled at the prospect of pyramids.
Miss Theodosia rocked him gently in her arms. Perhaps she would rock him the whole day and a half—they could not prevent her! She would not stop rocking if twenty Reformed Doctors came and looked at her. She would rock in their faces!
A sudden and queer thought came to her of Cornelia Dunlap standing in the doorway, looking in as John Bradford had done.