“Well, she was laughing at him in the shakiest, hungriest little voice you ever heard. 'Is it good?' she says. 'It LOOKS good.' He was eating raw corn. 'If I could, I'd eat supper with you when you're VERY hungry, you don't mind eating things raw.' Then she saw me.”
“Well?”
“Well, I coaxed her, Robert. It didn't do any good. Tomorrow somebody must go there and interfere.”
“She must be a remarkably strange child,” the minister mused. He was thinking of the holding-out powers of the three children he had a half-ownership in.
“I don't think Rebecca Mary IS a child, Robert. She must be fifty years old, at the least. She and her aunt are about the same age. Perhaps if her mother had lived, or she hadn't made so many sheets, or learned to knit and darn and cook—” The minister's kind little wife finished out her sentence with a sigh. She took up a little garment in dire straits to be mended. It suggested things to the minister.
“Can Rhoda darn?”
“RHODA!”
“Or make sheets and bread and things?”
“Robert, don't you feel well? Where is the pain?” But the laugh in the pleasant blue eyes died out suddenly. Little Rebecca Mary lay too heavy on the minister's wife's heart for mirth.
Aunt Olivia went into Rebecca Mary's room in the middle of the night. She had been in three times before.