“But you live here alone!”
“No,” she said, quickly. “Not after dark. I ain’t never alone. Oh, no!”
She spoke as though she were afraid Ruth might not believe her, and repeated the denial several times.
Tess and Dot were very anxious to go upstairs and see the rooms in the “shoe,” and they made the request to Ruth in an audible whisper.
“For sure!” cried Mrs. Bobster. “All the children that come here want to go upstairs. If I had ’em of my own, that’s where I’d put ’em all to bed after I’d fed ’em bread and ‘whipped ’em all soundly,’” and she laughed.
“I don’t believe you’d have whipped the children, if you’d been the really truly little old woman that lived in the shoe,” quoth Dot, putting a confiding hand into the apple-faced lady’s hard palm.
“I bet you wouldn’t have had to be whipped,” laughed Mrs. Bobster, leading Dot away, with Tess following.
Later the hostess of the shoe-house brought out a pitcher of milk and glasses with a heaping plate of ginger cookies—the old-fashioned kind that just melt on your tongue!
“Sho!” she said, when Ruth praised them. “It’s easy enough to make good merlasses cookies. But ye don’t wanter have no conscience when it comes to butter—no, indeed!”
Agamemnon came to the feast. In his ridiculous red flannel suit he waddled up to his mistress and pecked crumbs off her lap when she sat down on the bench in the arbor.