“There ain’t anything happened, has there?” her fond eyes on Lavender.
“I’ll say something’s most happened,” the boy began. “Sidney here thinks she ought to go home on account of something she said yesterday—”
“Lav, let me do it,” implored Sidney. “Aunt Achsa, I—I’m so ashamed of the way I answered you yesterday about my hair. I ought to have told you—you had a right—but I guess I wanted to feel grown up and independent. And I am sorry.”
At Sidney’s halting confession Aunt Achsa looked what Lavender, with his odd coinage of words, had described as the “most forgivingest person.” She actually blushed.
“Why, law’s sake, child, your Aunt Ascha didn’t mind—don’t worry your little head over that. I ain’t forgotten how a girl feels even if it was a long spell ago that I was fifteen. Old as I am my tongue gets loose in my head lots of times and runs away with itself. That’s a way tongues has of doing. And you worryin’ over it and thinkin’ about going home! Why, why—it’s nice to have you here. Only last evening I said it to Mr. Dugald. It’s like you were one of us—”
“Do you really mean that, Aunt Achsa? I’m not company any more or—or—a distant cousin?”
“Not a bit. And now long’s you and Lavender’s come home in the middle of the morning, which I will say give me a turn, you can set down on the step out there and pit these cherries for me!”
“Cherry pie?” cried Sidney, glad over everything.
“Better. I’ll bet pickled cherries!” Lavender had spied the row of glistening glass jars on the table. “And they’re licking good.”
Sidney took the checkered apron Aunt Achsa handed her and tied it about her slim person, then they sat down upon the step in the sunshine and fell to their task. From the shade of the lilac bush Nip and Tuck regarded them with their inscrutably wise eyes. Without doubt Nip and Tuck knew why Sidney’s voice lifted so gaily as the red juice trickled down her brown arms.