The bundle—the great bundle—was her work! She advanced into the room and began carefully to unroll it. It was the turn of the minister's wife to be paralyzed. She pushed forward a chair, and the child sat down in it.
“It's my Thousand Quilt that I'm making for Aunt 'Livia,” explained Rebecca Mary. “It's 'most done. There's a thousand pieces in it, and I'm on the nine hundred and ninety-oneth. I thought proberly you'd have some work, so I brought mine.”
“Yes, I see—” The minister's wife stood looking down at the tight little red figure among the gorgeous waves of the Thousand Quilt. They eddied and surged around it in dizzy reds and purples and greens. She was conscious of being a little seasick, and for relief she turned back to the puzzle of the little trousers. It had been in her mind at first to express sorrow at Rhoda's being unfortunately away—and the boys. Now she was glad she hadn't, for it was quite plain enough that the visitor had not come to spend the afternoon with the minister's children, but with the minister's wife.
“It isn't she that's young—it's I,” thought the minister's wife, with kind, laughing eyes. “She's old enough to be my mother.” “How old are you, dear?” she added, aloud.
“Me? I guess you mean Aunt 'Livia, don't you? It's Aunt 'Livia's birthday I'm making it for, it's going to be a present. Once she gave me a present on my birthday.”
Once!—the minister's wife remembered Rhoda's birthdays and the boys'. Taken altogether, such a host of little birthdays! But this little old, old visitor seemed to have had but one.
“My birthday is two days quicker than Aunt 'Livia's is,” volunteered the visitor, sociably. “We're 'most twins, you see. Aunt 'Livia was fifty-six that time she gave me the present. She's agoing to be fifty-nine when I give her this quilt—it's taken me ever since to make it.”
The minister's wife looked up from her cutting. So Rebecca Mary was only fifty-nine!
“It's quite a long quilt,” sighed Rebecca Mary. But pride woke in her eyes as she gazed out on the splendors of the green and purple sea. “A Thousand Quilt has so many stitches in it, but when you sew'em all yourself—when you sew every single stitch—” The pride in Rebecca Mary's grave blue eyes grew and grew.
“Robert,” the minister's wife said that night to the minister, “it's an awful quilt, but you ought to have seen her eyes! It's taken her three years to make it—maybe you wouldn't be proud yourself!”