"Somebody save the toast!" cried Clementina and smiled very brightly.
They needed no more. Timothy Toplady sprang at the toast, and already Abel Halsey and Doctor June were shaking Delia's hand; and Mis' Amanda, throwing her shawl back over her shoulders from its pin at her throat, enveloped Delia in her giant arms. And the others came pushing forward, on their faces the smiles which, however they had faltered in the passage seeking a precedent, I make bold to guess bodied forth the gentle, hesitant spirit which informed them.
As for me, I waited without, even after the others had entered. And as I lingered, the outer door was pushed open to admit some late comer who whisked down the passage and stood in the dining-room doorway. It was Calliope.
"Delia More!" she cried; "didn't I tell you how it'd be if you'd only let 'em know? An' Mis' Proudfit, you here? I been worried to death on account o' forgettin' to take home your cream lace waist I mended."
Madame Proudfit's voice lowered the high key of the others talking in chorus.
"We drove over to get it, Calliope," she said. "And here we found our Delia More."
At eleven o'clock that night, as I sat writing a letter in which the spirit of what had come to pass must have breathed—as a spirit will breathe—Calliope Marsh tapped at my door; and she had a little basket.
"Here," she said, "I brought you this. It's some o' everything we hed. An'—I'm obliged for my s'prise," she added, squeezing my hand in the darkness. "I surmised first thing, most, when Delia described you. No; land, no!—Delia don't suspicion you got it up. She don't think of it bein' anybody but just God—an' I donno's 'twas. An' that's what Abel thinks—wa'n't Abel splendid? You know 'bout Abel—an' Delia? You know he use' to—he wanted to—that is, he was in—oh, well, no. Of course you wouldn't know. Well, Delia don't suspicion you—but she said I should tell you something. 'You tell her,' she says to me, 'you tell her I say I guess I take stock now,' she says; 'tell her that: I guess I take stock now.'"
At this my heart leaped up so that I hardly know what I said in answer.