Aunt Katharine laughed. If anything could please her more than to have a girl get the best of a controversy it was to know that she had kept on after getting the worst. She had always approved the spirit of those old Britons, of whom Cæsar complained that they never knew when they were beaten.
“What do you mean by saying she’s made of the right sort of stuff?” she asked suddenly.
“Why, I mean,” said Tom, hesitating a little,—he was not analytical in his turn of mind,—“I mean she’s plucky, and she’s out-and-out about everything. I’d trust her as quick as I would a boy.”
“As quick as you would a boy!” repeated Aunt Katharine, bristling; “what do you mean by that, I’d like to know.”
Tom had not come for a controversy with Aunt Katharine, and she really looked a little dangerous at that moment. But he remembered suddenly that word of Kate’s, that the old woman’s manner didn’t “faze” her, after the first, and he determined, as far as in him lay, not to be fazed either.
“Why, I didn’t mean anything bad,” he said, drawing a little nearer the edge of his chair, “but there’s a difference, you know. At least you would know if you were a boy. Most girls are sort of sly when they want to get anything out of you, and they do things they wouldn’t think were fair for you to do. But she wasn’t that way. She always let you know what she was up to, and when it came to fighting she struck right out from the shoulder. But I wasn’t blaming the rest of ’em. I guess it’s all right, being girls,” he added, rising and beginning to move toward the door.
Aunt Katharine rose too, and brought her cane down on the floor with a sharp thud. “That’s it!” she said, fiercely. “Boys ’n’ men, you’re all alike, and you’ve got the notion already. You act as if we women folks were weaker creatures than you are. You make us think we are; and then you look for all the tricks that weaker creatures use when they defend themselves. It serves you right if we do use ’em. But it’s a lie all the same, for both of us.”
She drew her lips hard, then, as she saw his hand on the knob of the door, she said, “Tell your grandfather I’ll be up to see him to-morrow.”
She did not keep the promise. The rain, which had been threatening for days, falling now and then in drizzling showers, then stopping again, as if, though still in sullen mood, some vacillating purpose held it, settled down at last for steady work. There was a week of leaden days, with the rain beating out all that was left of the color in the woods, and changing the world into one brown monotony which melancholy seemed to have marked for her own.
And through it all, at the old house, Ruel Saxon kept his bed, and as the days went on grew no better. There was not much pain: a little fever, a growing drowsiness, a failing appetite, a little swelling of the limbs. Even the doctor seemed not to know what it was that had crept so suddenly upon the active frame, but he looked graver with every visit. Once, as he added another vial to the little row on the stand by the bed, he mentioned a name which the sick man, opening his eyes a little wider, repeated, adding, “That was what ailed my grandfather;” and then he closed his eyes without sign of uneasiness. Perhaps he remembered how much stronger in all its seeming powers was this body of his than that worn-out form from which the spirit of the grandfather stole away at last.