“Tut, tut!” clucked Aunt Martha, and frowned. “You must have had that coat at least two seasons. Well, Nellie will grow to it in another year, and we’ve got to get you a new coat for winter, somehow. There’s an old ulster of mine perhaps I could dye and cut over for you. But winter’s some ways off, and we won’t go crossing bridges till we get to ’em.”
Near the bottom of the trunk Jacqueline discovered three pairs of Peggy Janes—overalls such as Aunt Edie would have shrieked aloud to see her wear. She made up her mind to wear them, here at the farm. Maybe she would go barefoot, too—or at least barelegged and in sneakers, like Dickie and Neil.
In the last armful that Jacqueline carried upstairs was a box of Japanese lacquer, tied with an old hair-ribbon. Jacqueline had the curiosity to open it when she was in her room and Nellie’s. Then she wished that she hadn’t. She felt as if she had walked into a room without knocking. There were in the box a few letters, tied up with a bit of worsted, and slipped upon the worsted, and secured with a knot, was a plain gold ring. There were two little pins—not a child’s pins—and a slender chain of gold beads. There was a little pair of scissors, and a bag of crocheted purple silk, which held two spools of fine cotton. There was a tiny fine handkerchief, with the letter C half finished in the corner, and the threaded needle stuck in the place, just as some one had left it. Last of all, wrapped in a piece of white tissue paper, was a small photograph of a lady with gentle eyes and a sweet mouth, like Caroline’s.
Very soberly Jacqueline put back everything as she had found it, and tied up the box, and hid it away in the back of the drawer.
“Those were Caroline’s mother’s things,” she thought, “and she’s dead. I won’t touch ’em again, ever.”
By now it was dusky in the little room, as the long June day came to an end. Aunt Martha trudged up the stair, with a well-trimmed oil lamp in her hand. Behind her lagged Freddie and Nellie.
“I’ll get ’em to bed,” she told Jacqueline. “Freddie sleeps in my room, just across the hall. You go sit in the hammock with the boys. By the time I’m through up here the water will be ready for you to have a bath, and I guess after that long hot journey, you’ll be ready for it.”
So Jacqueline sat out in the shabby hammock under the poplars, in the warm, sweet dusk, and saw the great June stars come out and the distant mountains subside into rims of inky blackness round the silent meadows. She and Neil and Dickie poked and crowded each other fraternally, and Dickie boasted about his hunting trips on the mountain with Ralph, and Jacqueline raged inwardly because, in her part of Caroline, she couldn’t cap his stories with her account of the Yosemite.
At last Aunt Martha called her into the kitchen. There were two kettles on the oil stove, and a big bath towel, worn rather thin, lay over the back of a chair.
“There’s the washroom,” Aunt Martha told Jacqueline, and nodded toward a door at the farther end of the kitchen.