“Oh, she’s forgiven you already,” said Mrs. Northmore; “and if she punishes you at all, it’ll be by way of showing you some special favors, you may be sure of that.”
“There she comes now,” said Kate, as footsteps were heard approaching on the tiled floor of the hall; and she added, listening to the thud of the heavy feet, whose stout slippers dropping at the heels doubled the fall with a solemn tap, “walking as if she went on two wooden legs and a pair of crutches.”
The comparison was not bad, and the laugh that followed it had hardly ended when the old servant showed a lugubrious face at the door.
“Howdy, Aunt Milly?” cried Kate before the other had a chance to speak. “Here we are, you see, home again. I was just coming out to the kitchen to tell you how we got along, and see if you could give us a bite to eat. I suppose you think we had our suppers at the farm, and so we did; but it wasn’t like one of your suppers, and I guess you know how much appetite you have when you’re all mixed up with the cooking. Don’t bother to bring anything in here, but just let us sit out in the kitchen with you.”
At this artful proposal Milly’s face shortened unmistakably. “Don’t know’s I’ve got anything you’d keer about,” she began with a show of reluctance, “but I’ll knock round and see what I can find for you.”
“Oh, you’ll find something—you always do,” said Kate. “By the way, I thought I smelled something good when I was coming up to the house.”
“It was the catalpa blossoms, and you know it,” said Esther, laughing, and looking at her sister with a reproving glance, when the door had closed behind Milly.
“Well, but she did make a spice cake, and it smells awfully good,” said Virgie. “It’s warm now, and she wouldn’t break a crumb of it for me.”
“There!” said Kate, triumphantly. “You see how people are helped out, when they prevaricate for high moral ends. Come on to the kitchen. I’ll never pretend to be smart again if I can’t put Aunt Milly in good spirits before we’ve been there long.”
It would have been an incomplete picture indeed of the Northmore household which did not include old Aunt Milly. An important figure she was and had been ever since the girls could remember. But in truth her connection with the family was of much older date than that. She had been born and reared a slave on the Kentucky plantation which had been the home of Dr. Northmore’s boyhood. He had left it earlier than she, having before the war gone out from the large circle of brothers to establish himself in his profession in a neighboring state. But when, in the changed times, the servants had scattered from the old place, Milly had made her way to the home of her favorite, and urged with many entreaties that she might fill a post of service there.