As the doctor held her, the soft place under his coat grew very soft indeed. A little girl had been his last legacy from his dying wife; and she had grown to be about as large as Rosebud, and then had gone home to her mother. It almost seemed to him as if she had come back again; and it was her head beneath which his heart was beating. He beckoned to his daughter.
“Have you some of Aggie’s things?” he asked. “This child must be made comfortable, and she ought to go to bed soon.”
“No,” the child said; “I’m doing to sit here till the moon comes. That means ‘do to bed.’”
“Yes, I have them,” Miss Harding answered.
She had loved Aggie so well, that it seemed half sacrilege to put her dead sister’s garments on this stranger child; and half it was a pleasure that again she had a little girl to dress and cuddle. She went out of the room. Soon she came running back, and called her father.
“O, come here! I found this in the hall. It is a great basket full of all sorts of clothes, and it is marked ‘For Rosebud.’ See,—here is every thing a child needs.”
The doctor had set the little girl down, but she was still clinging to his hand.
“I think,” he said, “that Jane has been here, and that she does not mean to take away our Rosebud.”
But the little one, still clinging to him, said,—