Once outside, Miss Parrott turned suddenly.
"We'll go back to the garden," she said.
This pleased Rachel very much, and she forgot her distress and mortification, and actually smiled up into the old face.
"Your hand's shaking," she announced, turning her gaze to the long, slender fingers covering her own little brown palm.
"Is it?" said Miss Parrott absently.
"Yes, it shakes dreadfully," said Rachel, with a critical air.
"Look!"—pointing down at it.
"Oh, that is nothing," began Miss Parrott; then she stopped suddenly and put both hands on the thin little shoulders. "Oh, child," she said brokenly, "I did so hope you'd like me, for I've nothing in this world to live for, Rachel, and now you want to go back to the parsonage."
"Oh, I don't want to go back—I do love you!" cried Rachel, in great alarm, and she raised her little brown hands and actually smoothed the long, wrinkled face between them. "Don't look so, you look dreadful," she pleaded.
For at the touch of those childish hands over her face, Miss Parrott broke utterly down, all her aristocratic traditions falling away in a second of time, to reveal her lonely, hopeless life. And she sobbed in a way very hard for any onlooker to hear. To Rachel, powerless to stop her, it seemed the most terrible thing in all this world, and she burst out in her misery:
"I'll stay here forever if you'll stop."