Bud hardly listened, she was so taken up with her gift. She pounced at the handle of the kitchen door and found it snibbed within. “Kate! Kate!” she cried; “let me in to light my lantern.”
Kate was to be heard moving within, and there was a curious sound of giggling, but no answer.
“Open the door—quick, quick!” cried Bud, again, and this time Auntie Bell, inside, said:
“Yes, open, Kate; I think we're ready.”
The door of the kitchen opened, and before the eyes of the child was a spectacle the more amazing and delightful since all day they had taken pains to keep the preparations secret. A dozen children, who had been smuggled in by the back door in the close, were seated round a tub of water with floating apples, and they were waiting her presence to begin their fun.
Oh, how happy was that hour! But not just then came the thrill of which I'm thinking. It was not the laughter and the ducking in the tub, the discoveries of rings and buttons, thimbles, and scuddy little dolls and silver pieces hidden in the mound of champed potatoes Kate had cooked; nor the supper that followed, nor the mating of nuts on the fire-ribs that gave the eerie flavor of old time and the book of ballads. She liked them all; her transport surely was completed when the guizards entered, black-faced, garmented as for a masque, each thumping a sheepskin stretched on a barrel-hoop—the thing we call a dallan. She had never discovered before what a soul of gayety was in Auntie Bell, demure so generally, practising sobriety, it might seem, as if she realized her dancing days were over and it was time for her to remember all her years. To-night Miss Bell outdid even Ailie in her merriment, led the games in the spacious kitchen, and said such droll things, and kept the company in such a breeze that Ailie cried at last, “I think, Bell, that you're fey!”
“Indeed, and I dare say you're right,” admitted Bell, sinking in a chair exhausted. “At my time of life it's daft; I have not laughed so much since I was at Barbara Mushet's seminary.”
Not these things, but the half-hour after, was what made the evening memorable for the child. Nothing would satisfy her but that she should light her lantern and convoy the other children home; so Kate went with her, and the happy band went through the street, each dropping off at her own house front till the last was gone, and then Bud and the maid turned back.
But Kate had a project in her mind that had been there all night since she had burned two nuts for herself and Charles in the kitchen fire, and found them willing to flame quite snug together. That, so far, was satisfactory, but she wanted more assurance of the final triumph of her love. There was, it seemed, a skilful woman up the lane who knew spells and magic, read tea-cups and the cards, and could unravel dreams. Notably was she good at Hallowe'en devices, and Bud must come and see her, for it would not take a minute.
They found their way by the light of the lantern to the spae-wife's door, and to a poor confidant of fate and fortune surely, since she had not found them kinder to herself, for she dwelt in a hovel where foolish servant-girls came at night with laughter and fears to discover what the future held for them. Bud, standing on the floor in the circle of light from her own lantern, watched the woman drop the white of an egg in a glass of water. In the clot of the albumen, which formed some wavering, vague figures, she peered and found, she said, the masts of ships and a crowded harbor, and that meant a sailor husband.