“Seems like to me the most important people in this town must respect you mighty highly!” he exclaimed happily. “Well, I guess it’s that same way everywhere—all kinds of people are bound to recognize a real lady when they meet her and look up to her!”
“Oh, yes, there’s one thing more.” She added this as if by an afterthought. “You needn’t tell anybody you meet—any of your old friends or any of the committeemen or anybody—where you’re stopping. You see, I didn’t arrange to take in any visitors for the reunion—there were reasons why I didn’t care to take in anyone—and now that I have you with me I wouldn’t care for anybody connected with the local arrangements to know about it. You understand, don’t you?—they might think I was presuming on their rights.”
“Oh, yes’m, I understand,” he said unsuspectingly. “It’ll just be a little secret between us if that’s the way you’d rather it was. But I couldn’t rightly tell anybody anyhow—seeing that you ain’t ever told me what your last name is. I’d like to know it, too—I aim to write you a letter after I get home.”
“My name is Lamprey,” she said. “Cecelia Lamprey. I don’t hear it very often myself—at least, not spoken out in full. And now I’d better be ringing up those influential friends of mine—you mustn’t be late getting started.”
The same taxicab driver who drove him on this day came again on the third day to take Miss Sissie’s venerable house guest to his train. It would appear that her car still was out of commission.
She did not accompany him to the station. Domestic cares would hold her, she told him. She did not go to the front of the house to see him off, either. Indeed a more observant person than Mr. Braswell might have marveled that so constantly she had secluded herself indoors during his visit; and not only indoors, but behind windows curtained against the bright, warm Southern sunshine. They exchanged their farewells in her living-room.
“I ain’t never going to forget you,” he told her. “If you’d been my own daughter you couldn’t ’a’ treated me any nicer than what you have—and me just an old stove-up spavined country-jake that you never saw before in your life and probably never will see again. You ain’t seen fit, ma’am, to tell me much about yourself—seems like you let me do most of the talking, and that suited me—but old as I am I know a perfect lady when I see one and that’s what you are, ma’am, and what always you must have been and always will be—good-by and God bless you!”
Saying nothing, she bent in the attitude of one accepting a benediction, and a moment later she was following him to the door and watching him as he crept in his labored, faltering gait along the entrance-hall. Under his arm was his luncheon to be eaten on the train; she had with her own hands prepared and boxed it. She waited there on the threshold until the hooded front door clicked behind him.
“Pansy,” she called then toward the back of the house, and now her voice had in it a customary rasping quality which, strangely, had been almost altogether lacking from it these past two or three days. “You, Pansy!”