He stood gravely considering the plan, with one hand in his mother's and one on Miss Polly's knee.
"I'll take Pang to nurse him," he said when he had decided against the suggestion of the apple and the penny. "He hasn't any nurse, and Fanny wouldn't like him to have hers. I'll take Pang."
"But Pang isn't a nurse, dear. There, now, run to Fanny. Miss Polly lives so far away she can't stay very long."
He went obediently, for he was usually amenable to his mother's commands, stopping only once at the door to ask if "Pang lived as far away as God and could she manage to get a message to Him about the poor boy needing shoes?"
"I declare I can't make out that child to save my soul," remarked Miss Polly as he shut the door carefully and ran down the hall to the nursery. "The more I study him the curiouser he seems to me. If he wan't so quick about some things you might think his wits were sort of addled—but they ain't, are they? Now, whatever do you reckon put the notion in his head to call me 'Pang?"
All the smiling, circular wrinkles in her face were working with amusement while her little black eyes twinkled like jet beads above the ruddy creases in her cheeks.
"I can't imagine, for he must have made up the word for himself. But don't you think he is like father, Miss Polly? I love to hear you say so."
"That child? Why, he's the very spit of yo' pa, Gabriella, and there ain't any two ideas about it. I thought so the very first time I ever saw him, and now that I come to think of it, it is exactly like yo' pa to be makin' up all kinds of foolish names out of nothin'. Yo' pa used to call me Poll Parrot, that he did."
"Mother thinks Archibald is going to be very much like him. She saw him in the mountains last summer."
"So she told me when I was down home. You ain't looking a bit well, Gabriella. You've got exactly the look Miss Letty Marshall had before she came down with heart complaint. The doctors were fussin' over her for weeks before they could find out what the trouble was, but I said all along it wan't nothin' in the world but a bruised heart, and sure enough that was just what they found out was the matter. You ain't had a feelin' of heart burn after you eat, have you? Sometimes it don't take you that way, though; you just begin to have palpitations when you go up and down stairs and then you start to wakin' up in the night with shortness of breath. That's the way my Aunt Lydy had it. You know I nursed her till she died, and I've seen her get right black in the face when she stooped to pick up a pin. It's her daughter Lydy that's waiting on old Mrs. Peyton now. You know Mrs. Peyton was feelin' kind of run down so her son Arthur—I call him Arthur to his face because I used to sew there when he wan't more'n knee high—well, Arthur said she'd have to have somebody to wait on her every minute and she thought she'd rather have Lydy than anybody else because Lydy was always so handy in a sickroom. That was six months ago, and Lydy's been stayin' on there ever since. She says there ain't anybody on earth like Mr. Arthur, and she never could make out why you didn't marry him. He ain't ever had an eye for anybody but you, and he's got yo' picture—the one in the white dress—on his bureau and he keeps a rose in a vase before it all the time. That ain't much like a man, but then there always was a heap of a girl in Arthur in little ways, wan't there?"