She made this absurd little speech with tears in her eyes; but Kyzie and Edith dared not laugh, for mamma's forefinger was raised. Mamma never allowed them to ridicule the friendship of the two little girls, who had made believe for more than a year that they were "aunt" and "niece." The play might be rather foolish, but the love was very sweet and true.
Lucy had been thinking all day of Barbara and longing for her arrival. A full hour before it was time for the stage she went a little way up the mountain with Jimmy, and they took turns gazing down the winding, dusty road through a spy-glass. "I shan't wait here any longer. What's the use?" declared Jimmy.
"She's coming! she's coming! I saw her first!" was Lucy's glad cry. And she ran down the mountain in haste, though the stage, a grayish green one, was just turning a curve at least a mile away.
"Well, you have been parted a good while," said Uncle James, as the two dear friends met and embraced on the coach steps; "a day and a half!"
"I'd have 'most died if I'd waited any longer," said Aunt Lucy, putting her arm around her niece and leading her up the gravel path with the pink "old hen and chickens" on either side.
The little girls were entirely unlike, and the contrast was pleasant to see. Lucy was very fair, with light curling hair:—
"Blue were her eyes as the fairy flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds
That ope in the month of May."
Bab was quite as pretty, but in another way. She had brilliant dark eyes and straight dark hair with a satin gloss. She was half a head shorter than her "auntie," though their ages were about the same. People liked to see them together, for they were always sociable and happy, and loved each other "dearilee."
"Oh, Bab," said wee Lucy, "I had such a loneness without you!"
"I had a loneness too, Auntie Lucy. Seemed as if the time never would go."