Saying which, she got herself out of the little rocker in haste, and pushed it toward her guest, meantime taking a plain wooden chair, also new, and adding:—
“Did you ever hear of anybody like her before?”
“Something's happened!” said Mart Colson, ignoring the reference to the mysterious pronoun,—her voice so full of a new and strange meaning that had Sallie been acquainted with the word she might have said it was filled with awe.
As it was, she only exclaimed, “What?” in an intensely interested tone.
“Why, look here! I brought it along to show you.”
Whereupon she produced from under her piece of torn shawl a large broken-nosed pitcher, a piece of brown paper carefully tied over the top. She untied the bit of calico string with fingers that shook from excitement.
“Look in there!” she exclaimed at last, triumph in her tone, reaching forward the pitcher.
Sallie looked, and drew in her breath with a long, expressive “O-h!”
There, reposing in stately beauty, lay the great white lily with its golden bell.
“Yes, I should think so!” Mart said, satisfied with the expression. “Did you ever see anything like that before? It ain't made of wax nor anything else that folks ever made. It's alive! I felt of it. It looks like velvet and satin and all them lovely store things; but it doesn't feel so; it feels alive, and it grew. But, Sallie Calkins, if you should live a hundred years, and guess all the time, you never could guess where I got it. Sallie Calkins, if you'll believe it, Dirk gave it to me!”