“I mean when families quarrel,” persisted the doctor.
“Oh, I think it is very sad!” the secretary said fervently.
“We were inseparable, as children,” Mary Madison said suddenly. “Tim is just a year younger than I.”
“You’re not going to give away all these beautiful Indian things, Doctor?”
The doctor, who had been staring absently into the shadows of the attic, roused herself. “Oh, why not? Merle here isn’t the sort that will want to hoard them! I loathe them all. It was just this sort of rubbish——”
She had risen, to fling open the top of one more trunk. Now she moved restlessly across the attic, and Merle, who did not know her mother in this mood, hopped after her.
“It was just this sort of rubbish, little girl,” Mary Madison said gently, one of her thin, clever hands laid against the child’s cheek, “that made trouble between—your Uncle Timothy and me. Just pictures and rugs—and Aunt Lizzie’s will.... Well, let’s get through here, and away from these ghosts!”
“I wish we had three children,” Merle said longingly. “You had your brother. But I haven’t any one! Did you hang up your stockings?”
“Dear me, yes! At the dining-room mantel.”
“Then I would hang mine there, if I—hanged—it,” Merle decided.