A week later Louise announced that she had seen Lena’s old lady. “Saw her at the Home yesterday. I like her. She sure is a peach.”
“Isn’t she just?” Lena responded, her face lighting up. “And did you see Frances’ angel-all-but-the-wings old lady too?”
“Yes, and she’s a peach also, but a different variety,” Louise answered with a laugh. “I gave your Miss Rextrew some mint gum and she popped it into her mouth as handily as if she’d chewed gum all her life.”
Lena nodded. “She wanted to try it. She wants to try everything that is going. She’s a live wire, that’s what she is—good old Nancy!”
“We went the rounds—Annie Pearson and I,” Louise continued. “Saw all the old ladies except one that doesn’t want any visitors. Most of ’em do, though; and say, girlies—” Louise’s sweeping glance included all in the room—“I reckon it won’t hurt any of us to run up there once a month or so when it means such a lot to those old shut-ins to have us.”
There was a swift exchange of amazed glances at this, from Louise Johnson, and then a murmur of assent from several voices, before Mary Hastings in her business-like way suggested, “Why not each of us set a date for going? Then we won’t forget—or maybe all go on the same day.”
“All right, Molly—you make out the list an’ we’ll all sign it,” Lena said, “and, say—make it a nickel fine for any girl that forgets her date or fails to keep it. Does that go, girls?”
“Unless for some good and sufficient reason that she will give at our next meeting,” Laura amended.
Then began a new era for the old ladies at the Home. Always on Saturday and Sunday afternoons and often on other evenings, light footsteps and young voices were heard in the corridors and rooms of the old mansion. Not only gentle Mrs. Barlow and eager old Nancy Rextrew, but all the women who had drifted into this backwater of life found their dull days wonderfully brightened by contact with these young lives. Nancy Rextrew looked years younger than on that Sunday when she had turned kidnapper. Naturally she was still the prime favourite with Lena and Eva, and gloried in that fact. But there were girls “enough to go around” in more senses than one, and most of them were faithful to their agreement, and seldom allowed anything to keep them from the Home on the date assigned to them.