Mrs. Maybrook rose, and without more words, after carrying the basket to the cook’s house, returned around the cabin to her seat facing Miss Anne. The smile she wore as she came back would usually have been taken by Anne for vulgar comment on her own display of what might, with reason, have been taken for pure affectation. Now it struck Anne as being like her own habit of smiling large, or smiling small, as she said, at some humorous aspect of the passing hour.
“What amuses you?” she queried pleasantly.
“Oh, I was just a-thinking you might feel about those berries like Mrs. Eve might of felt when she was coming on in years and one of her grandchildren fetched her a nice, red apple. Guess he got warmed for it. Sandals might have come handy in big families, those days!”
Anne looked up, laughing gaily, and noting by the exception how rarely Mrs. Maybrook failed in her grammar.
“Delightful! Now I feel historically justified. Are there any snakes here?”
“Oh, no; none to hurt. But, bless me, I never can hear about snakes without thinking of Sairy Kitchins.”
“And what was that?” said Miss Lyndsay, enjoying talk with a mind as fresh and unconventional as her guest’s.
“Oh, it ain’t much. You see, I’ve had asthma so bad that Hiram and me, since the children are gone, we have traveled here and there, trying to find a place where I wouldn’t have it.”
“Have you suffered much?” said Anne.
“Yes,—quite my share. But there are worse things.”