So Tess and Dot were ushered into the sitting room by the big girl, Posy. Mrs. Buckham was not likely to be found anywhere but in her chair, poor woman, as the children very soon learned. She was a gentle, gray-haired, becapped old lady who never left her chair, saving for her bed at night. She was a paralytic and could not walk at all; but her fingers were busy, and she was fairly surrounded by bright colored worsteds and wools, finished pieces of knitting and crocheting, and incompleted work of like character.
Out of this hedge of bright-hued fancy-work, Mrs. Buckham smiled upon the smaller Corner House girls quite as warmly as did Mr. Buckham himself.
"I do declare! this is a pleasure," she cried, drawing one little girl after the other to her to be kissed. "Little flower faces! Aren't they, Posy? Wish I had a garden full o' them—that I do!"
"My mercy, Mrs. Buckham! I'm glad you ain't," laughed the maid. "Not if they all favored Mr. Buckham and brought as much mud in on their feet as he does."
"Never mind, Posy," cried the very jolly invalid. "I don't track up your clean floors—and that's a blessing, isn't it?"
Dot looked rather askance at the bright-colored afghan that hid the crippled legs of the good woman. The legs were so still, and the afghan covered them so completely, that to the little girl's mind it seemed as though she had no lower limbs at all!
She and Tess, however, were soon quite friendly with the invalid. Posy bustled about between kitchen and sitting room, laying a round table in the latter room for tea for the expected guests. Mr. Buckham, having scraped his boots, came in.
"Well, how be ye, Marm?" he asked his wife, kissing her as though he had just returned from a long journey.
"Just the same, Bob," she replied, laughing. "I ain't been fur from my chair since you was gone."
Mr. Buckham chuckled hugely at this old pleasantry between them. They both seemed to accept her affliction as though it were a joke, or a matter of small importance. Yet Mrs. Buckham had been confined to her chair and her bed for twenty years.