"Can you guess why I loved you?" I asked. "Was it for your red shoes? Or for that tiny scar like a dimple I've always adored?"
"I never told you what made that," she said, after a moment. "I was a very little baby when my father got angry with mamma one day—he had been drinking—and he upset the cradle in which I was asleep."
She lifted her face, and I kissed the scar under the white shawl.
The next day when I came home to luncheon, she told me that she had been to her old home to see Miss Mitty.
"I couldn't stand the thought of her loneliness, so I went into the drawing-room at the hour I knew she would be tending her sweet alyssum and Dicky, the canary. She was there, looking very thin and old, and, Ben, she treated me like a stranger. She wouldn't kiss me, and she didn't ask me a single question—only spoke of the weather and her flower boxes, as if I had called for the first time."
"I know, I know," I said, taking her into my arms.
"And everybody else is so kind. People have been sending me flowers all day. Did you ever see such a profusion? They are all calling, too,—the Fitzhughs, the Harrisons, the Tuckers, the Mayos, Jennie Randolph came, and old Mrs. Tucker, who never goes anywhere since her daughter died, and Charlotte Peyton, and all the Corbins in a bunch." Then her tone changed. "Ben," she said, "I want to see that little sister of yours. Will you take me there this afternoon?"
Something in her request, or in the way she uttered it, touched me to the heart.
"I'd like you to see Jessy—she's pretty enough to look at—but I didn't mean you to marry my family, you know."
"I know you didn't, dear, but I've married everything of yours all the same. If you can spare a few minutes after luncheon, we'll drive down and speak to her."