"There!" echoed Percy, with a great sigh. She deposited the old brown egg basket full of the May-flowers that looked so pearly among the wealth of thick green leaves, took off her "blinders" also, and sat down in the nearest pew. They were both so out of breath that they said no more at first.
The longer they kept silent, the more still and solemn seemed the empty place. Dusty, indeed, littered, and defaced, it all was. Thick, dingy cobwebs hung from the pulpit; a gray hornets' nest showed in one lofty corner; the pulpit stairs were broken; many of the pews were gone entirely; splinters of board and laths, stray leaves of hymn-books, a tuning-fork, a broken lamp, fragments of mortar, and varied rubbish, strewed the uneven floor. In spite of all that, it was still a church to Percy. With reverent eyes she looked up at the pulpit, where the minister used to stand, at the gallery, where the singers' seats used to be. She wondered who used to sit in this very pew years and years ago; she wondered if the clothes they wore, their Sunday best, looked like the queer bonnets and gowns that Aunt Bethiah kept laid away in her old locker. When Reba said, "Percy," she started, half shocked, as though somebody had called out her name in service-time.
Reba, meanwhile, had been just as busy thinking, but her thoughts had been very different ones.
"Percy Shipley," said she, solemnly, "I've thought of something perfectly splendid."
"You have? What is it?" asked Percy, expectantly.
Reba was exploring the cobwebby pulpit. She leaned over the edge, and said, in a low, impressive voice, with a flap of the damp sun-bonnet toward Percy, who rose eagerly in her pew to listen: "Nobody uses this church. Let's you and I use it."
"What! preach in it?" gasped Percy.
"No, no," said Reba, laughing until the sun-bonnet fell out of her hand, and went tearing through the cobwebs, "but have it for our place, don't you see? to keep house, and tell secrets, and have a lovely time in. Oh, Percy! wouldn't it be grand?"
"Oh, Reba! would you dare?"
The soft, clear eyes, full of wonder and appeal, in Percy's pew, lifted up wide open toward the great black ones of Reba looking down from the pulpit. The dark ones, with a flash of excitement in them, never wavered.