But not really forgotten, after all. For some link of tenderness must still remain that they should think of her now after all these years of separation, and want to visit her. They remembered the cookies! She smiled 20 reminiscently. What a batch of delectable cookies she would make in the morning! Why, to-morrow would be Wednesday! They would be here to-morrow night! And there was a great deal to be done!
She turned from the belated sunset unregretting, and hastened to begin her preparations. There were the two front rooms up-stairs to be prepared. She would open the windows at once, and let the air sweep through all night. They had been shut up a long time, for she had brought the invalid down-stairs to the little sitting-room the last few months to save steps and be always within hearing. The second story had been practically unused except when Ellen or the children were over for a day or two.
She hurried up-stairs, and lit the gas in the two rooms, throwing wide the windows, hunting out fresh sheets and counterpanes. She could dust and run the carpet-sweeper over the rooms right away, and have them in order; and that would save time for to-morrow. Oh, it was good to have something cheerful to do once more. Just supposing she had yielded––as once that afternoon she almost had––to Ellen’s persistent urgings, and had gone home with her to-night! Why, the telegram might not have reached her till after the children had come, and found the house empty, and gone again!
Julia bustled around happily, putting the rooms into charming order, hunting up a little picture of the child Samuel kneeling in the temple, that Allison used to like, going to the bottom of an old hair trunk for the 21 rag doll she had made for Leslie to cuddle when she went to sleep at night.
Mrs. Ambrose Perkins across the way looked uneasily out of her bedroom window at half-past nine, and said to her husband:
“Seems like Julia Cloud is staying up awful late to-night. She’s got a light in both front rooms, too. There can’t be company. I s’pose Ellen and some of her children have stayed down after all. Poor Ellen! She told me she simply couldn’t spare the time away from home any longer, but Julia was set on staying there. I never thought Julia was selfish; but I s’pose she doesn’t realize how hard it is for Ellen, living that way between two houses. Julia’ll go to live with Ellen now, of course. It’s real good of Herbert Robinson to ask her. Julia ought to appreciate having relatives like that.”
“Relatives nothing!” said Mr. Ambrose, pulling off his coat and hanging it over a chair. “She’ll be a fool if she goes! She’s slaved all her life, and she deserves a little rest now. If she goes out to Herbert Robinson’s, she won’t be allowed to call her eyelashes her own; you mark my words!”
“Well, what else can she do?” said his wife. “She hasn’t any husband or children, and I think she’ll be mighty well off to get a good home. Men are awful hard on each other, Ambrose. I always knew that.”
Julia Cloud meanwhile, with a last look at the neat rooms, put out her lights, and went to bed, but not to sleep. She was so excited that the darkness seemed luminous about her. She was trying to think how 22 those two children would look grown up. Allison was nineteen and Leslie nearly seventeen now. Their mother had been dead five years, and they had been in boarding-schools. Their guardian was an old gentleman, a friend of their mother’s. That was about all she knew concerning them. Would they seem like strangers, she wondered, or would there be enough resemblance to recall the dear girl and boy of the years that were gone? How she clung to those cookies with hope! There was some remembrance left, or they would not have put cookies in a telegram. How impetuous and just like Allison, the boy, that telegram had sounded!
It was scarcely daylight when Julia Cloud arose and went down to the kitchen to bake the cookies; and the preparations she made for baking pies and doughnuts and other toothsome dainties would lead one to suppose that she was expecting to feed a regiment for a week at least.