Honor breathed hard.
“Everything do happen all to once,” she said.
“Maybe I didn’t ought to have intruded; but I’m older than you, an’ I thought—”
“You be safe. I’m too weak to bear malice against you. My darling’s screwed down now. If you’d seed him yesterday, you’d have called back your wicked word, Avisa Mogridge. He weren’t ugly after he died—he—oh, God, an’ not one sound of his little noise in the house. It’s killing me.”
“To be frank with you, Honor, you must marry again. You’m only twenty-three. Yes, I know you be. An’ ’twas my little girls put them flowers ’pon your window-sill last June on your birthday morning. They done it afore daybreak. An’—an’—oh, woman, I be broken-hearted for ’e; God’s my judge if I ban’t.”
Mrs. Haycraft was rocking herself backward and forward, and crying.
Suddenly she rose up.
“Come an’ see the coffin,” she said. “Several of the gentry have sent greenhouse flowers to me. There’s a butivul smell to ’em.”
“I will come; an’ I want to say this. My girls—do ’e let ’em help with the thing you want. They’d make six with t’other children. Do ’e let ’em, Honor.”
“’Tis too late; they can’t get black now.”