"Oh, let's!" she begged. "And I'll pretend I'm sitting with Gladys in the Evans pew and that Mr. Mann is preaching."
Mr. Jerry stopped the car by the roadside and they all stepped out.
"What a doggone idiot I was," Mr. Jerry whispered to Miss Thorley as they followed his Aunt Mary and Mary Rose; "I might just as well have taken the kid to Mifflin as to Blue Heron Lake, but I never thought of it."
"This is better," Miss Thorley told him with pleasing promptness. "Mifflin would have reminded her of Jenny Lind. You can take her there some other day."
"Will you go, too?" eagerly. "I'll go any day you say."
But she only smiled over her shoulder as she went up the steps and into the meetinghouse. A quiet peaceful hour followed and when the service was over Mary Rose slipped one hand around Mr. Jerry's fingers and gave the other to Miss Thorley.
"I feel a lot better," she said. "I think it was awfully kind of that minister to preach about sparrows. Jenny Lind isn't a sparrow but she's a bird and when the Lord looks after sparrows so carefully I'm sure he'd keep an eye on a canary."
She was more like her old self as they went on, faster now, because, as Mr. Jerry explained, they had to make up the time they had spent in church and if they didn't reach the hotel at Blue Heron Lake in time for dinner all the chicken breasts and legs would be eaten and there would be nothing left for them but backbones and necks.
"That's all Gladys ever has," Mary Rose told him importantly. "You see they have such a big family that all the other pieces are gone before it is her turn to be helped. She used to love to come to dinner at our house so she could have a wishbone. When her grandmother dies she'll have a leg."
"My gracious!" murmured Mr. Jerry's Aunt Mary.