Also, if her tongue was perforce silent, her brain was busy, and with something of her Aunt Betty’s decision, she intended to have her say before that coming interview was finished.
All was very quiet at Heartsease when she reached it. Even the twins were abnormally serious, sitting on the wide, flat doorstep of the kitchen entrance, and looking so comical that Dolly laughed. For the Fifth Day meeting Dorcas had clothed them properly. Her ransacking of old closets had resulted in her finding a small lad’s suit, after the fashion of a generation before. A tight little waist with large sleeves, which hung over the child’s hands, and a full skirt completed the main part of his costume; while his nimble feet were imprisoned in stout “copper-toes,” and a high-crowned, narrow-brimmed hat covered his already shorn head. Such was Benjamin, in the attire of his uncle at his own age.
As for Sapphira-Ruth,—a more bewitching small maiden could not be imagined. She wore her mother’s own frock, when that mother was five. Its cut was that of Dorcas’s own, even to the small cap and kerchief, while a stiff little bonnet of gray lay on the step beside her. Ruth’s toes also shone coppery from under her long skirt; and the restraint of such foot gear upon usually bare feet may have been the reason why the little ones sat sedately where they had been placed without offering to run and meet their old friend.
Eli Wroth started to get out of the cart, but Dorothy had a word to say about that.
“No, sir, please! You sit still with Leah and hold the horse. I’m going in first to speak to Mr. Sands, but I’ll come back.”
Tapping at the kitchen door, she stooped to kiss the twins, receiving no further response than to see Benjamin wipe her kiss away; Ruth, as a matter of course, immediately doing the same.
Nor was there any answer to her knock, and since the door was ajar she pushed it wide and entered. Dorcas sat there asleep; her work-worn hands folded on her lap, her tired body enjoying its Fifth Day rest.
Oliver was invisible but Dorothy softly crossed to a passage she saw and down that, stepping quietly, she came upon him alone in his office. The door to that inner, secluded room—Leah’s room, she understood at a glance—this door was open, and the miller sat as if staring straight into it. So gently Dolly moved that he did not hear her, and she had gone around him to stand before his face ere he looked up and said:
“Thee? thee?”
“Yes, I. Mr. Sands, I know the whole story, and I’m sorry for you. I’m more sorry though for the little old woman who belongs in that room. It’s pleasant enough but it has been her prison. It has deprived her of lots of fun. If I should bring her back to it, would you let her go out of it sometimes, into the world where she belongs? Would you let her come to visit me? Would you take her to meeting with you as is her birthright? Would you put your pride aside and—do right? If I would bring her back?”