Once Rebecca had knocked at Miss Roxy's door without receiving any answer and, peeping into the window of the downstairs chamber where she slept, had seen her lying on her bed with the gray shawl round her shoulders and a man's military coat over her feet. Like lightning the thought flashed through the child's mind: "Why not make a quilt for Miss Roxy?"
Patchwork had to be sewed, day in and day out, as was the custom. There were never enough sheets to oversew, and needlework was a Christian duty; therefore, patchwork—in and out of season. It was cheap, too. Nobody would mind if she and the other girls did extra work, begged their own pieces, and gave away the result for a Thanksgiving or Christmas present. The matter had been put before mothers and aunts, accepted, and scraps already collected. It only remained to choose the design.
So far so good; but that was not why Rebecca had tied pink tape on one of her pigtails—not at all! The mere notion of the quilt, a secret from all the village save the families involved—this had enchanted the five girls from the beginning; but something else was unfolded in the pine-grove meeting.
"You see," said Rebecca, "I was up to Miss Roxy's last night and she'd been crying. She cries 'most every day."
"What for, I wonder? She lives alone, so there's nobody to be cross to her," said Alice Robinson, who had troubles of her own.
"I guess it's the things that have happened in bygone days." (Rebecca had an incurably literary style in conducting meetings, and indulged unconsciously in nights of sentiment and rhetoric.) "Her mother and father died and her brother embezzled and Aunt Jane thinks that a gentleman played with her feelings and she's never been the same since."
"'Played with her feelings!' What's that?" inquired the unsentimental Emma Jane Perkins.
"Gave her hopes and then married another without saying so much as 'Boo,'" explained Rebecca.
"And there was a sister that did something dreadful, I don't exactly know what," hinted Candace darkly; "but she lives out West and Miss Roxy writes and writes to her, but she never answers."
"And she was the one Miss Rosy loved best of all," added Rebecca with a tear in her voice. "I asked her yesterday why she didn't sit in the kitchen with a window open and not in the little front entry that'll hardly hold her rocking-chair. She said if anybody should come any time suddenly she could get down the steps quicker to meet them. She never comes down to any of us, and I know it's the sister she means. Oh, dear!"