“I ain’t making them notice me,” she mumbled, “but yer just can’t take a joke.”
Noreen and Jan-an, in those warm autumn days––and what an autumn it was!––often came to the little chapel where Northrup wrote.
They knew this was forbidden; they knew that the mornings were to be undisturbed, but what could a man who loved children say to the two patient creatures crouching at the foot of the stone steps leading up to the church?
Northrup could hear them whisper––it blended with the twittering of the birds––he heard Noreen’s chuckle and Jan-an’s warning. Occasionally a flaming maple branch would fall through the window on to his table; once Ginger was propelled through the door with a note, badly printed by Noreen, tied to his collar.
“We’re here,” the strangely scrawled words informed him; “me and Jan-an. We’ve got something for you.”
But Northrup held rigidly to his working hours and finally made an offer to his most persistent foes.
“See here, you little beggars,” he said, including the gaunt Jan-an in this, “if you keep to the other side of the bridge, I’ll tell you a story, once a day.”
This had been the beginning of romance to Jan-an.
The story-telling, thus agreed upon, opened a new opportunity for meeting Mary-Clare. Quite naturally she shared with Noreen and Jan-an the hours of the late afternoon walks in the woods or, occasionally, by the fireside of her own home when the chilly gloaming fell early.
Often Northrup, casting a hurried thought to his past, and then forward to the time when all this pleasure must end, looked thoughtful. How circumscribed those old days had been; how uneventful at the best! How strange the old ways would seem by and by, touched by the glamour of what he was passing through now!