“One afternoon he put out his hand to me and laughed—his gay laugh that I always loved.
“ ‘I’m leaving you little except my blessing, Acushla,’ he said. ‘But you can’t say I haven’t given you a bully good time for a while.’ Then he went to sleep smiling, and that was the end of it all.”
She did not tell the thing sadly—had even a tender little laugh for the characteristic last words of the reckless, merry father she had loved so dearly; but there was a lump in Archibald’s throat.
She had made him free of something more intimate than her birch glade or her sunset, and he thanked her for it in his heart.
The talk drifted away from personalities after that. She gave him bits of Valley history—humorous chiefly, though now and then pathos or tragedy showed its head, as it will wherever human lives are in question. She sang to him too, sweet old Irish love songs.
“But you should have heard Daddy sing them,” she said. “He had a voice made just for love songs.”
She was all aglow with interest and enthusiasm when he told her of the expedition to Pittsfield.
“Oh, the fun of it,” she crowed jubilantly. “I’ve so longed to get things for her—loads of things—but I couldn’t. There are so many who are in worse need of the little I can do. Did she tell you that I did try to give her a home here when her father disappeared? She wouldn’t come. It wasn’t that she didn’t love me. She made that very clear; but she said that, being well and having Ellen, I didn’t need her. She was ever so much obliged to me but she thought she’d just see to Mrs. Potter and the babies. The Potters were so shiftless. You may be thankful that your artist ways earned you a reputation for shiftlessness here in the Valley. You’d never have had Peggy if you had seemed capable of taking care of yourself.”
She made a list of things for Pegeen’s outfit—necessaries that began where dresses and aprons ended, and she tried hard to reconcile consideration for Archibald’s purse with zeal for Pegeen’s welfare, conscientiously cutting down first extravagant flights of imagination regarding underwear and stockings and then soaring recklessly into the realm of superfluities after a parasol.
“Peg has always been crazy for a parasol,” she explained shamefacedly, “but of course it isn’t really a necessity.”