The lad began to drum on the table. "Why do I want a sister?" he repeated a trifle temperishly. "Why, so I could have some one to play with and walk with and talk with and study with. Some one jolly and merry and frisky."
"Why—what about me?" she quizzed. Even at that moment I felt reasonably certain that she was still smiling.
The little lad looked bluntly up into her face. "Why you are—so old!" he said quite distinctly.
I saw the woman's shoulders hunch as though her hands were bracing against the table. Then she reached out like a flash and clutched the little lad's chin in her fingers. If a voice-tone has any color, hers was corpse-white. "I never—let—you—know—that—you—were—too—young!" she almost hissed.
And I shut my eyes.
When I looked up again the woman was gone, and the little lad was running after her with a queer, puzzled look on his face.
Life has such a strange way of foreshortening its longest plots with a startling, snapped-off ending. Any true story is a tiny bit out of rhetorical proportion.
The very next day, under the railroad trestle that hurries us back and forth to the big, neighboring city, we found Mrs. Lennart's body in a three-foot pool of creek water. It was the little lad's birthday, it seems, and he was to have had a supper party, and she had gone to town in the early afternoon to make a few festive purchases. A package of tinsel-paper bonbons floated safely, I remember, in the pool beside her. For some inexplainable reason she had stepped off the train at the wrong station and, realizing presumably how her blundering tardiness would blight the little lad's pleasure, she had started to walk home across the trestle, hoping thereby to beat the later train by as much as half an hour. The rest of the tragedy was brutally plain. Somehow between one safe, friendly embankment and another she had slipped and fallen. The trestle was ticklish walking for even a person who wasn't lame.
Like a slim, white, waxen altar candle snuffed out by a child's accidental, gusty pleasure-laugh, we brought her home to the sweet, green, peaceful library, with its resolute, indomitable hearthstone.
Out of all the crowding people who jostled me in the hallway I remember only—Lennart's ghastly, agonized face.