She reached up her hand and pulled me down. "Mother said," she began.
"You needn't tell a stranger what mother said," and I put my finger on her lips.
"Thee's no more of a stranger than Emily Warren," said the little girl reproachfully. "I can't think of thee without thinking of her."
I raised my eyes in a quick flash toward the young lady, but she had turned to the piano, and her right hand was evoking a few low chords.
"Miss Warren can tell you," I said, laughing, "that when people have been struck by lightning they often don't think straight for a long time to come."
"Crooked thinking sometimes happens without so vivid a cause," Miss
Warren responded, without looking around.
"Zillah's right in thinking that thee can never be a stranger in this home," said Mrs. Yocomb warmly.
"Mrs. Yocomb, please don't think me insensible to the feelings which are so apparent. Should I live centuries, the belief that I had served you and yours after your kindness would still be my pleasantest thought. But you overrate what I have done: it was such obvious duty that any one would have done the same, or else his ears should have been cropped. It gives me a miserably mean feeling to have you thank me so for it. Please don't any more."
"We forget," said Miss Warren, advancing to the window, "that Mr. Morton is versed in tragedies, and has daily published more dreadful affairs."
"Yes, and has written 'paragraphs' about them that no doubt seemed quite as lurid as the events themselves, suggesting that I gloated over disasters as so much material."