“But Daddy Jack, dear, and Cousin Jane.”
Caro laughed again.
“Daddy Jack says he wrote for me yesterday—after I’d started, all by my smart self. And I’ll tell Cousin Jane after a while. She’ll have something brand-new to lecture us about for the next twenty-five years. I feel like Carnegie and Rockefeller rolled into one: it isn’t often she gets the benefaction of an enormity like this, is it?”
It had been a cloudy morning, dark, and wet with the night’s rain; but now the sunlight swept across the hills and up from the branch, and struck through the soft colors shimmering about the trees like rainbows in a mist. The Peon and David tiptoed in, beaming.
“You’d better let us go by and break the news to them at Cousin Chad’s,” said David; “you’ll get a shock over the ’phone if they aren’t prepared.”
“I’m going over there this afternoon,” said Caro calmly. “I’m going all by myself and engineer Cousin Jane through the boiling-over process; she’ll be all right when she settles down to a simmer. Now get out, both of you: Mammy Lil and I want to rest.”
She slipped into her kimono and stretched herself beside me, holding my arm across her breast and stroking it with a light touch which expressed everything without words. Once in awhile she talked a little in her own sweet, whimsical way, and then lapsed again into the silence of utter content.
I turned my head to speak to her presently, and found her gone. The shadows, which had been dancing up toward the house when the sun came out, had lengthened all down the lawn to the valley, and across it to the hills on the other side. I lay watching them with that long-lost sense of refreshment which follows unbroken sleep. Down by the gate David was letting in Caro’s pony-cart and climbing to a seat beside her. Presently their laughter floated through the windows, and then she was in the room again, perched on the window-seat by the bed.
“I’m trying not to be proud, Mammy Lil,” she observed in a chastened voice; “but Cousin Jane is done to a turn, and almost cool enough to set away in the cellar. She’s pleased with me, too; she said if she just could have kept Lyddy from meddlin’ she believed she could have raised me up to be a real comfort to her. Why didn’t you let her? She gave me some outing cloth to make into petticoats for a missionary box that’s to go west. Who but Aunt Jane would bestow fuzzy petticoats on missionaries in the spring? But she bought the stuff at a bargain sale for four cents a yard, and feels that it’s providential; and we can put in plenty ourselves to make up for it.”
“And she won’t fuss about your staying here?” I asked anxiously.