First she lighted the four candles that stood, two on each side of the mirror, on her shining mahogany dressing-table. Then she undressed, put on her long, white nightgown, and said her prayers with a troubled alternation of fervour and forgetfulness. She was slipping. Then, one by one, she looked her presents well over again, noted that each was just as perfect as it had seemed to her every other one of the dozen times she had examined it, and wondered with a pang what had become of all their magic. Her scintillant delight in them had faded to a mere dull drab perception of their merits. Her eyes filled, and a lump rose in her throat. She was far over the crest of the pinnacle, on the cold, enshadowed side of the steep.
The one kitten, whom she had named "Mr. Grim,"—a round-faced, round-eyed gray and white furred baby, not yet accustomed to the loss of his two saucer mates,—crept snuggling against her bare ankles and mewed mildly, begging to be noticed. Barbara picked it up, fondled it in her bosom, threw herself down on the bed with it, and burst into a passion of tears. She felt as if she had been long, long away. She was poignantly homesick for her old self, her old childishness. The burden of being grown-up suddenly arose, thrust itself upon her, and grew great and terrifying and not to be borne. She was oppressed, too, with self-reproach. Absorbed in vivid and novel sensations, during the past few eventful days she had not thought as much as usual about her old comrades,—the kittens, Keep, Black Prince, and Mercy Chapman. And now in her weakness she thought they had suffered from her neglect. As a matter of fact, the difference had been purely in her own mind. The kittens, who were quite dependent upon her, had been as tenderly cared for as ever, but while caring for them she had thought of other things more novel and significant. In giving away two of them she had done just what she had planned and promised from the first. But now she scourged herself for heartlessness and inconstancy, pretending she had sent them away just because she was tired of taking care of them and wanted to be free for new interests.
"Did its missis forget all about the poor little lonely baby, and send away her other babies, and get cruel and hard-hearted, just because she thought she was grown-up, and a new friend came along?" she murmured, after the first tempest was over, to the gray and white kitten now purring comfortably against her soft throat. She sat up in bed with it to caress it more effectively.
"She is a bad missis, and perfectly horrid!" she went on, between sobs; and the kitten, who did not mind damp, was highly pleased. "She has been perfectly horrid. But to-morrow she's going to be just her old self again, and take up the tuck in her petticoats, and fix her hair like it was before we ran away. And we'll go to Doctor Jim and Mercy Chapman and just snatch back those other poor babies; and we'll all go off together down into the back garden, by our apple-tree, and have a lovely time. And—and—yes, we will forgive old Debby, and go and see her to-morrow. We'll take Uncle Bob, and then there won't be any bother about explanations."
Then her tears flowed forth anew, till the kitten was quite uncomfortably wet; and, with fresh resolves to be all child again on the morrow, she sobbed herself to sleep, with the thick hair tangled over her eyes and grieving lips.
But the long, sweet sleep brought complete renewal to Barbara's spent forces, and waking found her composedly happy, with a blessed sense of problems solved and desired things coming to pass. Her heart was a-brim with sunshine, but the only sunshine in the room was that she held in her heart, for the light that came through the diamond panes was gray, and the sky behind the leafy branch was gray, and, as she looked, the first of the rain came, blown in streaming gusts against the glass, and shedding a narrow line of drops across the polished floor. One leaf of the window was open, and Barbara sprang from bed to shut it, laughing as the cold drops spattered her feet. She had no quarrel with the rain that day, there being enough pleasures indoors to keep any maid's mind busy.
After breakfast, however, when she found that Uncle Bob was going down into the village to call on the Reverend Jonathan Sawyer, to drink a glass with Squire Gillig in his snug office behind the store, and to pay his respects to Doctor John and Doctor Jim, then Barbara felt the lure of the rain, and said she would go with him.
"I love the rain," she explained,—"and it's so nice for the complexion, too! I'll go and tell Mercy Chapman about my presents, and take some jellies to her poor sick mother, while you are talking politics in the squire's back office, Uncle Bob. Then I'll meet you at Doctor John's office, and we'll step into Doctor Jim's, and bring both of them up to dinner with us, so we'll all be together as much as possible. Won't we, dear?" And she paused in the task of strapping on her goloshes, to appeal to Mistress Mehitable.
"You are proposing to make a lot of trouble for your aunt!" protested Glenowen.
"Indeed she is not," began Mistress Mehitable, warm to second Barbara's proposal. But before she could say more, there was a wilder gust among the trees outside, a fiercer burst of rain against the windows, and, with a huge stamping in the vestibule, came Doctor Jim, as if blown in by storm. All hurried to meet him, where he stood dripping in the hall door, and the expedition to the village was postponed. An hour later came Doctor John, even wetter and more dishevelled than his brother, from the bedside of a patient at the opposite end of the village. The two had planned that theirs should be the hospitality of that day, but the storm and Mistress Mehitable together triumphed. The old house was merry all day long with gay voices, its maiden fragrances of lavender and rose touched genially with breaths of the mild Virginia weed. And Barbara forgot, completely and for ever, how near she had been to drowning the furry "Mr. Grim" in the tears of her regret for her lost childishness.