“You helped me,” she said, and then she began to cry. “I am going to do my best,” she whimpered, between really big sobs, “and be nice at home anyway--but I wish--I wish I had had sense enough to measure when----” She didn’t finish, but I knew what she meant. I put my arms around her and she sat up and let her head rest on my shoulder.
“You’ll get this cold,” she whispered, after her sobs had a little quieted. I said I didn’t care. And then she kissed me. And I knew we were friends for always; the sort of friends that are tight enough to scrap and stand it, disagree and love.
After a little while more I left, because we both began to be embarrassed from the manner in which we had revealed what was way inside. . . . I went to bed thinking of families and of how often they neglect opportunities to know and love each other. I thought of Uncle Archie and Evelyn and then I thought how lucky I had been, for ever since I was three Uncle Frank had loved me, ever so hard; sometimes very absently, to be sure, but I always knew he cared and I think he knew I did. Before I slept, he always came in to sit on the edge of my bed and once and again he’d forget why and then he’d say, “Ho hum, what am I here for?”
And I’d say, “Good-night, Uncle Frank.”
Then he’d say, “Ho hum! To be sure!” and add “Good-night.” Then from the doorway he would say, “Ho hum, I love you,” and I would whisper, most always very sleepily, “I love you----” and I drifted away on that.
When I was tiny, Chloe began to send me to sleep with the remembrance that I loved someone and someone loved me, and I did it to Uncle Frank when I came, and that started it. . . . Perhaps some people might have thought it funny to hear a bent-shouldered man with a long beard say, “Ho hum. . . . I love you,” but it was never funny to me.
I will always see him outlined against the light from the hall--and silhouetted in that way in my door, and when I do, I hear his voice telling a sleepy little child that she was loved. And I know it was not funny. It was beautiful.
Chapter XVII--Who Caught the Mouse-Trap?
The night after my birthday party, at which the hostess was clothed in pink pyjamas and a coral bath-robe and one of her guests wore a crêpe de chine nighty, I slept badly. In the first place I was bruised and sore from my fall and in the second, frankly frightened. I kept imagining that I heard things, as you do when the lights are out and the world is still outside. My furniture creaked as the damp, night air crept in. A board snapped, then my radiator clanked. I used my flashlight about two hundred and eight times and then, ashamed of myself, lay back and decided I would go to sleep and not be silly. And I did go to sleep.
When I awoke it was quieter than ever and very still, but I knew by the goose-flesh, hot-and-cold, choked sensation I had, that I had been awakened by something foreign, perhaps a noise that should not have been, and that I was not alone. I lay shaking, but with my eyes closed, and then I felt a light flash across my face. I stirred, sighed as you do when half-awake, and turned. Then I heard footsteps near my bureau and a gently, sliding noise which was the drawer being pulled out. I stealthily reached for my night light, but it had been set off the table on the floor--put of my reach. And my flashlight was gone.