“A body would think you didn’t care, Chrissy,” said Nelly indignantly.
Care! Did she care about her chance of heaven?
Later in the evening, Nelly went straying off through the neighbours, telling her story, about Jim being in the Big Meadow, and then going off from them. Did This or That body see him? Nelly would ask, with wide, innocent eyes. She was only laughed at. Nobody saw Jim Cassidy! Let her go home and make up some better story than that, if she wanted to entertain people.
“But we did see him! the two of us saw him! and we even spoke to him! And he made us no answer, only disappeared, the same as if the ground had opened and swallowed him down!” Nelly insisted.
“Maybe so it did, but we’ll not swally your story!” was all the satisfaction Nelly got.
So she went home to Christina and “Ah, Chrissy, do you think would it be a warning, and that poor Jim just came back to tell us he’s dead, there beyant in America?” said Nelly, beginning to cry down tears like the rain.
But Christina never made her an answer. She couldn’t! What Nelly was after saying, was what she had been thinking. But such thoughts never seem so bad, till some one else puts them into words.
To think of Jim, Jim Cassidy dead! She nearly hated Nelly for saying the word that ends everything ... except Love.
She put her hand into her pocket, and pulled out Jim’s letter, and gave it to Nelly.
“That came this morning, and I never got the chance of showing it to you all day, till now,” she said. And she kept watching Nelly from under her eyelashes, to see would she mind it much.