“Yes, it's cool,” Aunt Olivia agreed, gratefully. After that the things they said were right things. The fantastic little figure down there in the orchard, skipping wildly, determinedly, was in none of them. Both of them felt it to be safer. But the minister's wife's gaze dwelt on the skipping figure and followed it through its amazing mazes, in spite of the minister's wife.
“I couldn't have helped it, Robert,” she said. “Not if you'd been there preaching 'Thou shalt not' to me! You would have looked too, while you were preaching. You can't imagine, sitting there at that desk, what the temptation was—Robert, you don't suppose Rebecca Mary has gone crazy?”
“Felicia! You frighten me!”
“No, I don't suppose either. But it was certainly very strange. It was almost ALARMING, Robert. And she didn't know how at all. I wanted to go down and show her!”
“It seems to me”—the minister spoke impressively “that it is not Rebecca Mary who has gone crazy—”
“Why, the idea! Haven't I made it plain?” laughed she. “I'll speak in A B C's then. Rebecca Mary was SKIPPING, Robert—skipping skipping.”
“Then it's Rebecca Mary,” the minister murmured.
“That's what I'm afraid—didn't I say so? Or else it's her second childhood—”
“First, you mean. If THAT'S it, don't let's say a word, dear—don't breathe, Felicia, for fear we'll stop it.”
“Dear child!” the minister's wife said, tenderly. “I wish I'd gone down there and shown her how. And I'd have told her—Robert, I'd have told her how to climb a tree! Don't tell the parish.”