How, then, was she to leave them with only a servant to look after them?
Perplexed and troubled, she returned after the doctor’s visit to her mother’s room, and one keen glance into the tired eyes of the sweet old lady settled the matter for her. Her mother was more to her than all the orphans in the world. Her mother was drooping sadly, overcome, the doctor thought, by a burden of care she should not have assumed, and shocked and broken by the death of her old friend, Margaret Capers.
It seemed that turmoil and confusion had come to The Snuggery only with the coming of the Pickels. Well, she would leave them the house, and they might tear it roof from rafter, for all she cared at that moment; she would do her duty by her mother, let come what would come!
Her energetic movement aroused Grandmother Kinsolving’s curiosity.
“What is it, daughter?”
Ruth intended to be very prudent and announce her plan in the least startling manner, but she was far too impulsive and too much in earnest to do this successfully. She tried, beginning two or three sentences in a temporizing fashion, and ending with an outburst of tears:
“The doctor says that thee is ill, so ill that I must take thee to the sea-shore. Tell me, darling mother, that it is not so very, very bad!”
Amy Kinsolving smiled. To Ruth there was nothing so beautiful as her mother’s smile, and that it still was left to cheer her went far toward calming her anxiety.
“The doctor is right, Ruth. I am a little worn and tired by this upsetting of our quiet life; but a few weeks away from it will give me strength to face the winter without being an added burden to thy weary shoulders. Thee needs the rest as much as I do. Thee takes things too much in earnest, and frets thyself over imaginary shortcomings. We will go away and leave the ‘little pickles’ to look after themselves, under Rosetta Perkins’s direction.”
Since her mother took the proposition so quietly, and answered so cheerfully, Ruth’s anxiety flew round to another side of the subject. “Rosetta Perkins! A pretty woman she is to have the care of such a houseful of young people!”