“Well, then, you don’t want to make her poorer, do you?” Kate asked with an arch look at Harry, for she evidently thought her final question decided the point.
The children had turned and were walking back to the house. They were come to the spot where Kate had met the man who was faint and ill, and to whom she had given Frank’s dinner.
“Come,” cried Kate, “this is a nice place to sit, under the shade of these big trees, and we’ll talk about it.”
Down she went with her fresh white dress on the green grass; and Harry was, in truth, very glad of the opportunity of resting, for it was his first walk in over a month.
“Now, tell us what it all means,” ejaculated Kate, with her pretty chin resting in the palm of one hand, and her blue eyes somewhere between the blue of the sky and Harry’s sober face.
“Well, it means, if I must tell you, that Mrs. Dobson talks out loud pretty often. She’s lived alone a good while, with only Josh in the house; and sometimes when I used to lie on my bed still, and maybe she thought I was fast asleep—I don’t know, though; and I wonder if folks who live alone don’t always talk to themselves—”
“I guess so,” said Kate. “I’m sure I should have to talk to somebody—I couldn’t help it; but do hurry and tell us what she said.”
“Never mind about the particulars,” put in Frank, as Harry still hesitated.
“Why, what I thought,” began Harry at length, “was that there was somebody in the room that she was talking to: for she said that she had lived alone, waiting and waiting, ever since her mother and father died, and she meant to wait a good while longer, too, only it would be so much easier and pleasanter not to wait all alone; and then she told how lonely ’twas in the winter when the snows came, and there wasn’t for a good many days a single track through the snow, and the ice was so thick on the shore and so strong in the bay that not one ship could come into the harbor. And I began to cry when she told about the long dark nights she had to stay all alone, without one single human heart—that was just what she said—beating near her own; and then all at once I knew she was praying, for she burst out with ‘O, dear Lord, if this boy you’ve sent to my house could only love me well enough to live with me just one winter!’”
Kate sobbed and Frank whistled, and Harry said, “What do you s’pose I did then?”