“Don't!” cried Rebecca impetuously, changing color and putting her hand over Emma Jane's lips. “If you won't I'll stop teasing. I couldn't bear a name put to anything, I couldn't, Emmy dear! I wouldn't tease you, either, if it weren't something we've both known ever so long—something that you have always consulted me about of your own accord, and Abijah too.”
“Don't get excited,” replied Emma Jane, “I was only going to say you were sure to be Mrs. Somebody in course of time.”
“Oh,” said Rebecca with a relieved sigh, her color coming back; “if that's all you meant, just nonsense; but I thought, I thought—I don't really know just what I thought!”
“I think you thought something you didn't want me to think you thought,” said Emma Jane with unusual felicity.
“No, it's not that; but somehow, today, I have been remembering things. Perhaps it was because at breakfast Aunt Jane and mother reminded me of my coming birthday and said that Squire Bean would give me the deed of the brick house. That made me feel very old and responsible; and when I came out on the steps this afternoon it was just as if pictures of the old years were moving up and down the road. Everything is so beautiful today! Doesn't the sky look as if it had been dyed blue and the fields painted pink and green and yellow this very minute?”
“It's a perfectly elegant day!” responded Emma Jane with a sigh. “If only my mind was at rest! That's the difference between being young and grown-up. We never used to think and worry.”
“Indeed we didn't! Look, Emmy, there's the very spot where Uncle Jerry Cobb stopped the stage and I stepped out with my pink parasol and my bouquet of purple lilacs, and you were watching me from your bedroom window and wondering what I had in mother's little hair trunk strapped on behind. Poor Aunt Miranda didn't love me at first sight, and oh, how cross she was the first two years! But now every hard thought I ever had comes back to me and cuts like a knife!”
“She was dreadful hard to get along with, and I used to hate her like poison,” confessed Emma Jane; “but I am sorry now. She was kinder toward the last, anyway, and then, you see children know so little! We never suspected she was sick or that she was worrying over that lost interest money.”
“That's the trouble. People seem hard and unreasonable and unjust, and we can't help being hurt at the time, but if they die we forget everything but our own angry speeches; somehow we never remember theirs. And oh, Emma Jane, there's another such a sweet little picture out there in the road. The next day after I came to Riverboro, do you remember, I stole out of the brick house crying, and leaned against the front gate. You pushed your little fat pink-and-white face through the pickets and said: Don't cry! I'll kiss you if you will me!'”
Lumps rose suddenly in Emma Jane's throat, and she put her arm around Rebecca's waist as they sat together side by side.