I went in where my mother sat with the lady from over the way, and explained the situation through my tears. Mother was very tender with me. Somehow I felt that she herself was sorry about something, for she dropped a tear on the wilted roses which I still held in my hand. Together we went out into the garden. Together we gathered all the flowers that there were—the big ones and the little ones—and formed them into a great bunch. It was for the major. I danced with sheer delight, knowing only too well how the kind face would light up when he saw all the flowers which he had admired so often made a present to him. I added buttercups, and dandelions, and bits of feathery grass, while mother watched me, with a sad smile, and said never a word.
The lady from over the way cried very hard on our front steps, but afterwards she dried her eyes and took my flowers to the major.
He did not come the next day or the next, though I watched at the gate, and then something strange happened. I was told not to go into the garden.
"Not this morning, Rhoda," my mother said. "Grandma and I are going out, and you must stay in the house. When we come back you may go out."
She dressed herself very quietly that day, all in dark things, and she and grandmother did not look joyful, as they always did when they went out together.
"I'd like to go, too," I said, wistfully.
Then Norah coaxed me.
"Ah, stay and play with your Norah," she cried. "Sure you'll not be after leaving your Norah alone in this big house!"
I always liked to play with Norah, when her work was done and she had time to be sociable. That day we played blindman's buff together—she, and I and the twins. Norah was always the blind man, and she was the longest time catching us, and when she did she could never tell who it might be. She would guess quite impossible people,—the grocer's boy, and the lady from over the way, and her own very mother in Ireland,—and she never once, by any chance, thought that it was Rhoda or little Dick or Trixie.