The kitten was better, but it was not a cure. Rebecca Mary took the little creature to her breast and told it her grief for Thomas Jefferson and cried her Thomas Jefferson tears into its soft, white fur. In that way, at any rate, it was a success.
“Maybe I shall love you some day,” she whispered, “but I can't yet, while Thomas Jefferson is fresh. He's all I have room for. He was my intimate friend—when your intimate friend is dead you can't love anybody else right away.” But she apologized to the little cat gently—she felt that an apology was due it.
“You see how it is, little, white cat,” she said. “I shall have to ask you to wait. But if I ever have a second love, I promise it will be you. You're a great DEAL comfortinger than that Tony Trumbull rooster! I could love you this minute if I had never loved Thomas Jefferson. Do you feel like waiting?”
The little, white cat waited. And Aunt Olivia waited. She made tempting dishes for Rebecca Mary's meals, and put a ruffle into her nightgown neck and sleeves—Rebecca Mary had always yearned for ruffles.
“I don't believe she sees 'em. She don't know they're there,” groaned Aunt Olivia, impotently. “She don't see anything but Thomas Jefferson, and I don't know as she ever will!”
But Rebecca Mary saw the ruffles and fluted them between her brown little fingers admiringly. She tried once or twice to go and thank Aunt Olivia, and got as far as her bedroom door. But the bitterness in her heart stayed her hand from turning the knob. If Aunt Olivia had only known that being sorry was the right thing to do! Strangely enough, though Rebecca Mary's view of the matter never occurred to Aunt Olivia, she came by and by to being sorry on her own account. Perhaps she had been all along, underneath her disquietude for Rebecca Mary's sorrow. Perhaps when she thought how quiet it had grown mornings, and what a good chance there was now for a supplementary nap, she was being sorry. When she remembered that she need not buy wheat now and yellow corn, and that the cookies would last longer—perhaps then she was sorry. But she did not know it. It seemed to come upon her with the nature of a surprise on one especial day. She had been working her un-“scrached,” untrampled flower-beds.
“My grief!” she ejaculated, suddenly, as if just aware of it. “I declare I believe I miss him, too! I believe to my soul I'd like to hear him crow—I wouldn't mind if he came strutting in here!” And “in here” was Aunt Olivia's beloved garden of flowers. Surely she was being sorry now!
It was the next day that Rebecca Mary's bitterness was sweetened—that she began to be cured. She and the little, white cat went down together to Thomas Jefferson's resting place. When they went home—and they went soon—Rebecca Mary got her diary and began to write in it with eager haste. Her sombre little face had lighted up with some inner gladness, like relief:
“Shes been there and put some lavvender on and pinks. I mean Aunt Olivia. And shes the very fondest of her pinks and lavvender. So she must have loved Tomas Jefferson. Shes sorry. Shes sorry. Shes sorry. And Ime so glad.”
Rebecca Mary caught up the little, white cat and cried her first tear of joy on its neck. Then she wrote again: