Tears sprang to Virginia's eyes, while her thin blue-veined hands gently caressed Miss Priscilla's swollen and knotted fingers.
"You couldn't tell me anything that would please me more," she answered.
"I used to think that Lucy would take after her, but she grew up differently."
"Yes, neither of the girls is like her. They are dear, good children, but they are very modern."
"Have you heard from them recently?"
"A few days ago, and they are both as well as can be."
"And what about Harry? I've always believed that Harry was your favourite, Jinny."
For an instant Virginia hesitated, with her eyes on the pot of red geraniums blooming between the white muslin curtains at the window. In his little cage in the sunlight, Miss Priscilla's canary, the last of many generations of Dickys, burst suddenly into song.
"I believe that Harry loves me more than anybody else in the world does," she answered at last. "He'd come to me to-morrow if he thought I needed him."
Lying there in her great white bed, with her enormous body, which she could no longer turn, rising in a mountain of flesh under the linen sheet, the old teacher closed her eyes lest Virginia should see her soul yearning over her as it had yearned over Lucy Pendleton after the rector's death. She thought of the girl, with the flower-like eyes and the braided wreath of hair, flitting in white organdie and blue ribbons, under the dappled sunlight in High Street, and she said to herself, as she had said twenty-five years ago, "If there was ever a girl who looked as if she were cut out for happiness, it was Jinny Pendleton."