"Stop talking about your last times! It's bad enough to have you go anyway. I don't know what I shall do without you."
"I don't know what I shall do without you, I'm sure," said Joy, shaking her head mournfully, "but then, you know, we're going to write to each other twice every single week."
"I know it,—every week as long as we live, remember."
"Oh, I shan't forget. I'm going to make father buy me some pink paper and envelopes with Love stamped up in the corners, on purpose."
"Anyway, it's a great deal worse for me," said Gypsy, forlornly. "You're going to Boston, and to open the house again and all, and have ever so much to think about. I'm just going on and on, and you won't be upstairs when I go to bed, and your things won't ever be hanging out on the nails in the entry, and I'll have to go to school alone, and—O dear me!"
"Yes, I suppose you do have the worst of it," said Joy, feeling a great spasm of magnanimity in bringing herself to say this; "but it's pretty bad for me, and I don't believe you can feel worse than I do. Isn't it funny in us to love each other so much?"
"Real," said Gypsy, trying to laugh, with two bright tears rolling down her cheeks. Both the girls were thinking just then of Joy's coming to Yorkbury. How strange that it should have been so hard for Gypsy; that it had cost her a sacrifice to welcome her cousin; how strange that they could ever have quarreled so; how strange all those ugly, dark memories of the first few months they spent together—the jealousy, the selfishness, the dislike of each other, the constant fretting and jarring, the longing for the time that should separate them. And now it had come, and here they sat looking at each other and crying—quite sure their hearts were broken!
The two tears rolled down into Gypsy's smile, and she swallowed them before she spoke:
"I do believe it's all owing to that verse!"
"What verse?"