“But how can he! But you haven’t seen her as she is now, and you never could imagine how she looks. He certainly seems to think a heap of her all the same, and as he can see as well as I can in the dark, he can’t help seeing that she looks old enough to be his great aunt. Well, I’m sorry for her but I wouldn’t be related to her for a gold mine. However, I can stand it once a week all right.”
In the following days, they recurred to the matter frequently. A dozen times, Miss Penny suggested suddenly a new topic of conversation that had popped into her head as appropriate for Anna to introduce as an alternative to that of tombstones; but each one being only more utterly absurd than the foregoing, Anna would laugh until she cried, Miss Penny joining her merrily. None the less, when she returned late Saturday afternoon, she announced that she had gotten away from the little lamb, though not perhaps very far.
The girl had proposed one subject after another, receiving no response. And it had presently been borne in upon her there could hardly be a response in the nature of the case. Mrs. Langley was really living, so far as she was alive at all, in another generation, so that trying to converse with her was like shouting to someone miles behind one on the highway and only visible because of curves in the course of it. The years she had lived in retirement had counted for little more than nothing. Her mind was twenty years younger than the village she dwelt in.
“When I realised that, I tried to get back, and after a bit she was glad to talk about Ella May,” Anna said to Miss Penny as she dried the china after tea. “Only you would hardly know it was Ella May. Mr. Langley’s Ella May has been growing all these years until she went to college with Rusty and jumped ahead and graduated and—O dear me! Hers is still a teeny baby three days old. Now, Miss Penny, when those two get to heaven one of them is going to have the surprise of their lives.”
“Why Anna,” murmured Miss Penny reproachfully.
“Meantime, things are at sixes and sevens with both of them. What she needs is another baby, and what he needs is a full grown wife. Both of ’em need it frightfully. But how in the world is it ever going to be brought about, and who is to do it? I may think I am Charley-on-the-spot for ordinary cases, but a sticker like this stumps me flat. It would take someone a heap smarter than me to haul her over all the years she has missed and bring her up to date. And while that’s being done to her mind, her face, her looks ought to be stretched the other way until she looks somewhere near as young as her husband.”
The girl sighed. “It’s like the North-west Passage. It ought to be done, and I suppose it could be, but not by yours truly. And the worst is, she refuses to see anybody else. She hardly pays any more attention to Mr. Langley than she did before—just sends him orders about me through Big Bell. O Miss Penny, did you ever hear the proverb ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’?”
CHAPTER VI
MEANTIME the other Miller girl had made a second call at the house in the lane which Reuben’s father had built. When her rat-a-tat at the door sounded drearily as from an empty house, the girl said to herself that it was too much. Most likely the ogress had slain her lovely daughter and then fallen dead herself and their corpses lay stretched upon the organ platform in the room which would never be a living-room thereafter. But the lovely daughter came to the door. The cold, haughty expression on her face changed to eagerness as she saw Anna and she smiled sweetly and rather touchingly.
“O Miss Miller, I am so glad—to see you,” she said. But with the last words enthusiasm had become dismay. She paled and looked appealingly at Anna.