But Milly had shaken her head wisely. It was the nature of cake, as it was of love, to be uncertain, and she refused to reconstruct her charm.
All this had happened years before, but when, by some lucky turn of memory, Kate recalled it now, and suggested that this perfect specimen of cake had been baked under the inspiration of her own love for Milly, the last shadow of the old woman’s melancholy vanished. “Well, Honey,” she said radiantly, “I reckon I shouldn’t have missed it fur if I had.”
She was prepared now to enjoy to the full the account which the girls gave of the experiences at the farm, including everything of importance, from Kate’s exaltation on the machine to Morton Elwell’s capture of the doughnuts. Over the latter incident her eyes fairly rolled with delight, and she interrupted the narrator to exclaim, “That chile’s boun’ to make a powerful smart man. Puts me in mind of Mars Clay, your uncle, you know, what got to be kunnel in the army. That chile did have the most ’mazin’ faculty for comin’ roun’ when a body was cookin’, an’ the beatin’est way findin’ out where things was kep’ an’ helpin’ hisself that ever I did see. I never will forgit how he fooled your grandma one year ’bout the jelly. Ole Miss she allus put her jelly in glasses with lids to ’em. She had a closet full that year, an’ every glass of it would turn out slick an’ solid. Mars Clay, he foun’ he could turn the jelly out on the lid, an’ cut a slice off’m the bottom, an’ jist slide the jelly back again. I seed him do it one day, but I never let on, and your grandma she never foun’ out, but she ’lowed ’twas mighty strange how her jelly did shwink that year.”
She shook with glee at that remembrance, and Kate forgave Morton Elwell over again for outwitting her, since the act had been the means of giving her one more story of the old days. But Milly’s delight reached its climax when Kate told of the favor with which the various dishes had been received at dinner, and how Farmer Giles, after helping himself to the third piece of corn-bread, had declared it the best he ever tasted, to which she had replied that it ought to be; it was made by Aunt Milly’s own receipt.
“Bless your heart, chile,” cried the old woman; “you didn’t tell him that now, did you? You mustn’t make the old darky too proud!”
She did not enter with quite as much enthusiasm into Kate’s description of the threshing machine, and reverted with a sigh to the days when the thresher was content with his flail, an instrument which she extolled as being “a heap safer than that great snorting machine” (she persisted in confounding its functions with those of the engine); and she refused to share in Kate’s wonder that people didn’t starve in those days waiting for the grain to be threshed.
The two were still discussing harvests past and present when Esther, feeling that she had done her full duty there, left the kitchen. She had never held quite the place in Milly’s affections which Kate enjoyed, nor had she of late years listened with her sister’s contentment to the old woman’s thrice-told tales. She left them now and went to seek her mother.
Mrs. Northmore was seated on the cool veranda with her hands in her lap, and that look of tired content which tells of a busy but successful day. A generous hospitality had left her a little worn. Esther sat down on the step at her feet and leaned her arms across her lap in a childish fashion she had never outgrown.
“I wish I didn’t get so tired of people whom I really like,” she said. “It would break Aunt Milly’s heart if she knew how she bores me. It seems to me sometimes I get tired of everybody—everybody but you, mother dear.”
Mrs. Northmore looked into her daughter’s eyes with a smile.