"It's just Mary Cary!" I called. "Miss Bray sent me, Mrs. Peet. She wants some cherry-bounce."
"Oh, all right, Mr. Peet. You needn't bother to come down. It's just little Mary Cary." And she opened the door a tiny crack and peeped through.
"Mr. Peet isn't very well to-night," she said. "He's taken fresh cold. But you can come in."
I came; but I didn't want to. And if Mr. Peet had come down those steps and shaken hands I wouldn't have been surprised. It's certainly strange how something you know isn't true seems true; and Mr. Peet, dead forty years, seemed awful alive that night. Every minute I thought he'd walk in.
She likes you to think he's living at night. Every day she goes to his grave, which is in the churchyard right next to where she lives; but at night he comes back to life to her. She's so lonely, I think it's beautiful that he comes.
I make out like I think he comes, too, and I always send him my love, and ask how his rheumatism is. I tell you, Martha don't dare smile when I do it. She don't even want to.
And, don't you know, old Mrs. Peet sent me a Christmas present, too. A pair of mittens. She knit them herself. It was awful nice of her.
I don't know how big the check was that Miss Katherine's billionaire brother sent her to spend on the children's Christmas, but it must have been a corker. The things she bought with it cost money, and the change it made in the Asylum was Cinderellary. It was.
She bought a carpet for the parlor, and some curtains for the windows, and a bookcase of books.
For the dining-room she bought six new tables and sixty chairs. They were plain, but to sit at a table with only ten at it instead of forty, as I'd been sitting for many years, was to have a proud sensation in your stomach. Mine got so gay I couldn't eat at the first meal.