“Maybe, then, it means she was grateful that she’d had him as long as she did,” suggested Peter.
“She was grateful to him because he had been so kind to her in life, I think,” said Felicity.
“What is a ‘distressed relict’?” asked Felix.
“‘Relict’ is a word I hate,” said the Story Girl. “It sounds so much like relic. Relict means just the same as widow, only a man can be a relict, too.”
“Great-Grandmother seemed to run short of rhymes at the last of the epitaph,” commented Dan.
“Finding rhymes isn’t as easy as you might think,” avowed Peter, out of his own experience.
“I think Grandmother King intended the last of the epitaph to be in blank verse,” said Felicity with dignity.
There was still only a sprinkling of people in the church when we went in and took our places in the old-fashioned, square King pew. We had just got comfortably settled when Felicity said in an agitated whisper, “Here is Peg Bowen!”
We all stared at Peg, who was pacing composedly up the aisle. We might be excused for so doing, for seldom were the decorous aisles of Carlisle church invaded by such a figure. Peg was dressed in her usual short drugget skirt, rather worn and frayed around the bottom, and a waist of brilliant turkey red calico. She wore no hat, and her grizzled black hair streamed in elf locks over her shoulders. Face, arms and feet were bare—and face, arms and feet were liberally powdered with FLOUR. Certainly no one who saw Peg that night could ever forget the apparition.
Peg’s black eyes, in which shone a more than usually wild and fitful light, roved scrutinizingly over the church, then settled on our pew.