Rebecca's Promise

by Frances R. Sterrett

"Of course, I'll go," she said at once. "It's too great a strain to be under the same roof with old Peter Simmons. I'm crazy to see him, Rebecca Mary, but I don't dare. Perhaps if I run away again he'll know that I don't want to be teased. I simply can't discuss a golden wedding present now. We've done it too often. But I don't know what I'll do, Rebecca Mary, if he doesn't remember what we planned. If I weren't so proud I should tell him that it begins with an H. But I can't even do that, Rebecca Mary. It's funny I should feel this way after fifty years, but I do. I can't help it even if I do know how silly it is."

So in the early morning Granny and Rebecca Mary and a very sleepy Joan left the house as stealthily as if they had been robbing Riverside and made their way from one clump of shrubbery to another to the gate. It thrilled Rebecca Mary, whose teeth fairly chattered. It even thrilled old Granny a bit, but it only puzzled Joan, who could not understand why she had been wakened so early nor why she was being taken from Riverside without saying good-by to her father although Granny told her that they had left a note for her father and one for old Peter Simmons. How Rebecca Mary did blush when Count Ernach de Befort was mentioned!

Before they reached the gate Richard came down the driveway in the car which had brought Granny and Rebecca Mary and Joan to Riverside. He stopped to speak to the guard, who was on the other side of the car so that the three prisoners were able to slip by it and hide themselves in the bushes which were most conveniently placed just outside the gate.

"Pooh!" exclaimed Granny as she settled herself in the tonneau with Joan, "if I had known how easy it would be I shouldn't have stayed twenty-four hours. Oh, well, I don't know as I care so long as I shall get home before old Peter Simmons. We have had a rest and a change. I don't often find fault with an experience after it is over. I did want to go to Seven Pines before the golden wedding, but perhaps it is just as well. You haven't anything to complain of, have you, Rebecca Mary? Riverside was more interesting for you than Seven Pines would have been. Wasn't it?"

"Much more interesting!" Rebecca Mary had never seen a foot of Seven Pines and so should not have been so quick to decide that Riverside was more interesting. "I'm glad that Major Martingale made prisoners of us." And then she remembered what had happened the last day she had been a prisoner, and she flushed and stammered. "At least I was glad." She looked at Richard to see if he remembered the secret that they shared, and he nodded and smiled. Rebecca Mary did not like to think of that last night. It made her hot all over, from the top of her head to her very heels, to remember what she had done. She hoped that no one but Richard would ever know.

"We're going home, we're going home," sang Joan to an air of her own composition. "I'm the only one who has what we came for," she announced jubilantly. "I came for my father and I found him right away. But you haven't your young heart, have you, Granny? And dear Miss Wyman hasn't found the payment for her insurance, have you, Miss Wyman?" How disappointed Granny and Rebecca Mary must be!

"Perhaps I didn't find the real young heart I wanted, Joan, but then I knew that an old body isn't just the place for a real young heart," Granny confessed honestly. "But my old heart is a lot younger than it was. It makes an old heart young in just the right way to match an old body to be with young people, you know." She gave the prescription gravely to Joan, and Joan received it as gravely.

"That makes two of us who have what we came for." Joan was even more jubilant. "I'm sorry you haven't, Miss Wyman." Miss Wyman couldn't know how sorry she was.

But Rebecca Mary didn't want sympathy from any one, and she said so at once. "Indeed I did make a payment on my memory insurance policy, Joan. I made a lot of payments. Why, at the rate I've been paying I shan't be able to collect all the payments on that memory insurance policy, not if I live to be a hundred!"