Mary Ann threw up her hands. “No wonder Selina’n’Jane are thin—they wear the flesh off their bones providing for the future. They’re born Colquhouns. I’m glad I take after your side of the family. Do you know what Selina told me, Ma? The preserves she put up this year won’t have to be touched till winter after next. She has enough to last her over two years. ‘Land sakes!’ I said, ‘what do you want to eat stale jam for, when you might have fresh?’ The two get competing which will be furthest ahead in their work; from the way 381 they talk, I shouldn’t wonder if before long their fall house-cleaning would be done in the spring. It makes me think of what Pa used to tell about his uncle Alick Colquhoun—how he was earlier and earlier with the milking, till at last the evening milking was done in the morning, and the morning’s was done the night before. Then there was Eva Meldrum; you remember she had all her marriage outfit ready before she was asked—sheets, tablecloths, and everything. As soon as Fred Healey proposed, she got right to work with the final preparations, and when she found herself left with nothing else to do—she just sat down and wrote out notes of thanks for the wedding gifts, leaving blanks for the names of the articles. I laughed till I was sore when she told me. ‘You’re a Colquhoun,’ I said, ‘though you do only get it from your grandma; you’re a Colquhoun by nature if not by name.’ You know I always say it comes from having such a name. It’s enough to make an anxious streak in the family, having to spell it, one generation after another.”
Mary Ann laughed so heartily that the sound reached her sisters, who wondered what “Ma’n’Mary Ann” were at now. And still the little cloud lingered, and the smile only flitted waveringly.
“I called at the library, Ma, and brought home the magazine. Now we’ll find out for sure whether Lady Geraldine marries the earl—I don’t believe but what she’s in love with the private secretary.”
“Did you do the shopping?” her mother whispered.
“Yes, and if you feel rested with your sleep, I’ll show you what I got. Mr. Merrill opened out such a heap of pretty things, I didn’t hardly know what to take. I was thinking, Ma, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have Miss Adams in to sew, the first week you’re downstairs, when we’ve got to be in the house anyway.”
At this moment Jane and Selina came into the room to see what the sounds of merriment meant. They looked at patient and nurse with disapproving gloom. Jane settled herself at once to her knitting; Selina, who never worked in the afternoon when she was wearing her widow’s collar and cuffs, sat regarding her mother with an expression of grieved wonder. Mrs. Colquhoun was uncomfortably conscious of being judged by something in her own child of other heritage than hers—one of the strangest sensations a parent can have.
“You’d ought to be kept quiet, Ma,” Selina said, after a prolonged scrutiny. “If you had any suitable book in the house, I’d read to you. There was one my poor husband used to listen to by the hour in his last illness—‘Preparations for the Final Journey.’”
“I’m going to run down and fetch that stuff I bought to-day to show it to Ma and get her opinion,” Mary Ann interrupted, and a minute later she was standing by the bed with the three dress lengths piled in confusion upon her arms. To the woman in the bed it was as if an angel looked out from over a tumbled rainbow and smiled a message of hope to her from the sky.
“Take an end of this tartan, will you, Jane, and stand off a little with it. There, I knew you’d like it, Ma. I said so to Mr. Merrill the minute he showed it to me. That flowered piece? That’s for a morning wrapper. I know it’s gay, but somehow, after the flowers are all over, I do hanker after gay colors. In summer I don’t feel to want them so much on my back when I can have them in the garden. The gray-blue’s for a company dress. I’ll have it made up in time for the reception to the new minister. You’ll need a dress for that too, Ma. We’ll get samples as soon as you’re well enough to choose. It was between this and a shot silk, but I thought this was more becoming at my age. To tell the truth,” confessed Mary Ann with a laugh, “I’d rather have had it than this, and more than either I’d love to have bought a dress off a piece of crimson velvet Mr. Merrill had just got in.”
She rested an elbow on her knee and sank the length of a forefinger in her plump cheek.