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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Rebecca Mary, by Annie Hamilton Donnell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Rebecca Mary
+
+Author: Annie Hamilton Donnell
+
+Posting Date: February 22, 2009 [EBook #3419]
+Release Date: September, 2002
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK REBECCA MARY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer
+
+
+
+
+
+REBECCA MARY
+
+By Annie Hamilton Donnell
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+I. THE HUNDRED AND ONETH
+
+II. THE THOUSAND QUILT
+
+III. THE BIBLE DREAM
+
+IV. THE COOK-BOOK DIARY
+
+V. THE BEREAVEMENT
+
+VI. THE FEEL DOLL
+
+VII. THE PLUMMER KIND
+
+VIII. ARTICLE SEVEN
+
+IX. UN-PLUMMERED
+
+
+
+
+
+The Hundred and Oneth
+
+
+
+Rebecca Mary took another stitch. Then another. "Ninety-sevvun,
+ninety-eight," she counted aloud, her little pointed face gravely
+intent. She waited the briefest possible space before she took
+ninety-nine. It was getting very close to the Time now. "At the hundred
+an' oneth," Rebecca Mary whispered. "It's almost it." Her breath came
+quicker under her tight little dress. Between her thin, light eyebrows a
+crease deepened anxiously.
+
+"Ninety--n-i-n-e," she counted, "one hun-der-ed"--it was so very close
+now! The next stitch would be the hundred and oneth. Rebecca Mary's face
+suddenly grew quite white.
+
+"I'll wait a m-minute," she decided; "I'm just a little scared. When
+you've been lookin' head to the hundred and oneth so LONG and you get
+the very next door to it, it scares you a little. I'll wait until--oh,
+until Thomas Jefferson crows, before I sew the hundred and oneth."
+
+Thomas Jefferson was prospecting under the currant bushes. Rebecca Mary
+could see him distinctly, even with her nearsighted little eyes, for
+Thomas Jefferson was snow-white. Once in a while he stalked dignifiedly
+out of the bushes and crowed. He might do it again any minute now.
+
+The great sheet billowed and floated round Rebecca Mary, scarcely whiter
+than her face. She held her needle poised, waiting the signal of Thomas
+Jefferson. At any minute.... He was coming out now! A fleck of
+snow-white was pricking the green of the currant leaves.
+
+"He's out. Any minute he'll begin to cr--" He was already beginning! The
+warning signals were out--chest expanding, neck elongating, and great
+white wing aflap.
+
+"I'm just a little scared," breathed the child in the foam of the sheet.
+Then Thomas Jefferson crowed.
+
+"Hundred and one!" Rebecca Mary cried out, clearly, courage born within
+her at the crucial instant. The Time--the Time--had come. She had taken
+her last stitch.
+
+"It's over," she panted. "It always was a-coming, and it's come. I knew
+it would. When it's come, you don't feel quite so scared. I'm glad it's
+over."
+
+She folded up the great sheet carefully, making all the edges meet with
+painful precision. It took time. She had left the needle sticking in the
+unfinished seam--in the hundred-and-oneth stitch--and close beside it
+was a tiny dot of red to "keep the place."
+
+"Rebecca! Rebecca Mary!" Aunt Olivia always called like that. If there
+had been still another name--Rebecca Mary Something Else--she would have
+called: "Rebecca! Rebecca Mary! Rebecca Mary Something Else!"
+
+"Yes'm; I'm here."
+
+"Where's 'here'?" sharply.
+
+"HERE--the grape-arbor, I mean."
+
+"Have you got your sheet?"
+
+"I--yes'm."
+
+"Is your stent 'most done?"
+
+Rebecca Mary rose slowly to her reluctant little feet, and with the
+heavy sheet across her arm went to meet the sharp voice. At last the
+Time had come.
+
+"Well?" Aunt Olivia was waiting for her answer. Rebecca Mary groaned.
+Aunt Olivia would not think it was "well."
+
+"Well, Rebecca Mary Plummer, you came to fetch my answer, did you? You
+got your stent 'most done?" Aunt Olivia's hands were extended for the
+folded sheet.
+
+"I've got it DONE, Aunt 'Livia," answered little Rebecca Mary, steadily.
+Her slender figure, in its quaint, scant dress, looked braced as if to
+meet a shock. But Rebecca Mary was terribly afraid.
+
+"Every mite o' that seam? Then I guess you can't have done it very well;
+that's what I guess! If it ain't done well, you'll have to take it--"
+
+"Wait--please, won't you wait, Aunt 'Livia? I've got to say something.
+I mean, I've got all the over-'n'-overing I'm ever going to do done.
+THAT'S what's done. The hundred-and-oneth stitch was my stent, and it's
+done. I'm not ever going to take the hundred and twoth. I've decided."
+
+Understanding filtered drop by drop into Aunt Olivia's bewildered brain.
+She gasped at the final drop.
+
+"Not ever going to take another stitch?" she repeated, with a calmness
+that was awfuler than storm.
+
+"No'm."
+
+"You've decided?"
+
+"Yes'm."
+
+"May I ask when this--this state of mind began?"
+
+Rebecca Mary girded herself afresh. She had such need of recruiting
+strength.
+
+"It's been coming on," she said. "I've felt it. I knew all the time it
+was a-coming--and then it came."
+
+It seemed to be all there. Why must she say any more? But still Aunt
+Olivia waited, and Rebecca Mary read grim displeasure in capitals across
+the gray field of her face. The little figure stiffened more and more.
+
+"I've over-'n'-overed 'leven sheets," the steady little voice went on,
+because Aunt Olivia was waiting, and it must, "and you said I did 'em
+pretty well. I tried to. I was going to do the other one well, till you
+said there was going to be another dozen. I couldn't BEAR another dozen,
+Aunt Olivia, so I decided to stop. When Thomas Jefferson crowed I sewed
+the hundred-and-oneth stitch. That's all there's ever a-going to be."
+
+Rebecca Mary stepped back a step or two, as if finishing a speech and
+retiring from her audience. There was even the effect of a bow in the
+sudden collapse of the stiff little body. It was Aunt Olivia's turn now
+to respond--and Aunt Olivia responded:
+
+"You've had your say; now I'll have mine. Listen to me, Rebecca Mary
+Plummer! Here's this sheet, and here's this needle in it. When you get
+good and ready you can go on sewing. You won't have anything to eat till
+you do. I've got through."
+
+The grim figure swept right-about face and tramped into the house as
+though to the battle-roll of drums. Rebecca Mary stayed behind, face to
+face with her fate.
+
+"She's a Plummer, so it'll be SO," Rebecca Mary thought, with the dull
+little thud of a weight falling into her heart. Rebecca Mary was a
+Plummer too, but she did not think of that, unless the un-swerving
+determination in her stout little heart was the unconscious recognition
+of it.
+
+"I wonder"--her gaze wandered out towards the currant-bushes and came
+to rest absently on Thomas Jefferson's big, white bulk--"I wonder if it
+hurts very much." She meant, to starve. A long vista of food-less days
+opened before her, and in their contemplation the weight in her heart
+grew very heavy indeed.
+
+"We were GOING to have layer-cake for supper. I'm VERY fond of
+layer-cake," Rebecca Mary sighed, "I suppose, though, after a few
+weeks"--she shuddered--"I shall be glad to have ANYTHING--just common
+things, like crackers and skim-milk. Perhaps I shall want to eat
+a--horse. I've heard of folks--You get very unparticular when you're
+starving."
+
+It was five o'clock. They WERE going to have supper at half past. She
+could hear the tea things clinking in the house. She stole up to a
+window. There was Aunt Olivia setting the layer-cake on the table. It
+looked plump and rich, and it was sugared on top.
+
+"There's strawberry jam in between it," mused Rebecca Mary, regretfully.
+"I wish it was apple jelly. I could bear it better if it was apple
+jelly." But it was jam. And there was honey, too, to eat with Aunt
+Olivia's little fluffy biscuits. How very fond Rebecca Mary was of
+honey!
+
+Aunt Olivia stood in the kitchen doorway and rang the supper bell in
+long, steady clangs just as usual. But no one responded just as usual,
+and by the token she knew Rebecca Mary had not taken the other stitch
+that lay between her and supper.
+
+"She's a Plummer," sighed Aunt Olivia, inwardly, unrealizing her own
+Plummership, as little Rebecca Mary had unrealized hers. Each recognized
+only the other's. The pity that both must be Plummers!
+
+Rebecca Mary stayed out of doors until bedtime. She made but one
+confidant.
+
+"I've done it, Thomas Jefferson," she said, sadly. "You ought to be
+sorry for me, because if you hadn't crowed I shouldn't have sewed the
+hundred and oneth. But you're not really to BLAME," she added, hastily,
+mindful of Thomas Jefferson's feelings. "I should have done it sometime
+if you hadn't crowed. I knew it was coming. I suppose now I shall have
+to starve. You'd think it was pretty hard to starve, I guess, Thomas
+Jefferson."
+
+Thomas Jefferson made certain gloomy responses in his throat to the
+effect that he was always starving; that any contributions on the
+spot in the way of corn kernels, wheat grains, angleworms--any
+little delicacies of the kind--would be welcome. And Rebecca Mary,
+understanding, led the way to the corn bin. In the dark hours that
+followed, the intimacy between the great white rooster and the little
+white girl took on tenderer tones.
+
+At breakfast next morning--at dinner time--at supper--Rebecca Mary
+absented herself from the house. Aunt Olivia set on the meals regularly
+and waited with tightening heartstrings. It did not seem to occur to her
+to eat her own portions. She tasted no morsel of all the dainties she
+got together wistfully. At nightfall the second day she began to feel
+real alarm. She put on her bonnet and went to the minister's. He was
+rather a new minister, and the Plummers had always required a good deal
+of time to make acquaintance. But in the present stress of her need Aunt
+Olivia did not stop to think of that.
+
+"You must come over and--and do something," she said, at the conclusion
+of her strange little story. "It seems to me it's time for the minister
+to step in."
+
+"What can I do, Miss Plummer?" the embarrassed young man ejaculated,
+with a feeling of helplessness.
+
+"Talk to her," groaned Aunt Olivia, in her agony. "Tell her what her
+duty is. Rebecca Mary might listen to the minister. All she's got to do
+is to take just one stitch to show her submission. It won't take but an
+instant. I've got supper all out on the kitchen table--I don't care if
+it's ten o'clock at night!"
+
+"It isn't a case for the minister. It's a case for the Society for the
+Prevention of Cruelty to Children!" fumed the minister's kind little
+wife inwardly. And she stole away in the twilight to deal with little
+Rebecca Mary herself. She came back to the minister by and by, red-eyed
+and fierce.
+
+"You needn't go over; I've been. It won't do any good, Robert. That
+poor, stiff-willed, set little thing is starving by inches!"
+
+"I think her aunt is, too!"
+
+"Well, perhaps--I can't help it, Robert, perhaps the--aunt--ought--to."
+
+"My dear!--Felicia!"
+
+"I told you I couldn't help it. She is so hungry, Robert! If you had
+seen her--What do you think she was doing when I got there?"
+
+"Crying?"
+
+"Crying! She was laughing. _I_ cried. She sat there under some
+grapevines watching a great white rooster eat his supper. His name, I
+think, is Thomas Jefferson."
+
+"Yes, Thomas Jefferson," agreed the minister, with the assurance of
+acquaintance. For Thomas Jefferson was one of his parishioners.
+
+"Well, she was laughing at him in the shakiest, hungriest little voice
+you ever heard. 'Is it good?' she says. 'It LOOKS good.' He was eating
+raw corn. 'If I could, I'd eat supper with you when you're VERY hungry,
+you don't mind eating things raw.' Then she saw me."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Well, I coaxed her, Robert. It didn't do any good. Tomorrow somebody
+must go there and interfere."
+
+"She must be a remarkably strange child," the minister mused. He was
+thinking of the holding-out powers of the three children he had a
+half-ownership in.
+
+"I don't think Rebecca Mary IS a child, Robert. She must be fifty years
+old, at the least. She and her aunt are about the same age. Perhaps if
+her mother had lived, or she hadn't made so many sheets, or learned to
+knit and darn and cook--" The minister's kind little wife finished out
+her sentence with a sigh. She took up a little garment in dire straits
+to be mended. It suggested things to the minister.
+
+"Can Rhoda darn?"
+
+"RHODA!"
+
+"Or make sheets and bread and things?"
+
+"Robert, don't you feel well? Where is the pain?" But the laugh in the
+pleasant blue eyes died out suddenly. Little Rebecca Mary lay too heavy
+on the minister's wife's heart for mirth.
+
+Aunt Olivia went into Rebecca Mary's room in the middle of the night.
+She had been in three times before.
+
+"She looks thinner than she did last time," Aunt Olivia murmured,
+distressedly. "Tomorrow night--how long do children live without eating?
+It's four meals now--four meals is a great many for a little thin thing
+to go without!" Aunt Olivia had been without four meals too; she would
+have been able to judge how it felt--if she had remembered that part.
+She stood in her scant, long nightgown, gazing down at the little
+sleeper. The veil was down and her heart was in her eyes.
+
+Rebecca Mary threw out her arm and sighed. "It LOOKS good, Thomas
+Jefferson," she murmured. "When you're VERY hungry you can eat things
+raw." Suddenly the child sat up in bed, wide-eyed and wild. She did not
+seem to see Aunt Olivia at all.
+
+"Once I ate a pie!" she cried. "It wasn't a whole one, but I should eat
+a whole one now--I think I should eat the PLATE now." She swayed back
+and forth weakly, awake and not awake.
+
+"Once I ate a layer-cake. There was jam in it. I wouldn't care if it
+was apple jelly in it now--I'd LIKE apple jelly in it now. Once I ate
+a pudding and a doughnut a-n-d--a--a--I think it was a horse. I'd eat
+a horse now. Hush! Don't tell Aunt Olivia, but I'm going to
+eat--to--e-at--Thom-as--Jeffer--" She swayed back on the pillows again.
+Aunt Olivia shook her in an agony of fear--she was so white--she lay so
+still.
+
+"Rebecca! Rebecca Mary! Rebecca Mary PLUMMER!" Aunt Olivia shrilled in
+her ear. "You get right out o' bed this minute and come downstairs and
+eat your supper! It's high time you had something in your stomach--I
+don't care if it's twelve o'clock. You get right out o' bed REBECCA
+MARY!"
+
+Aunt Olivia had the limp little figure in her arms, shaking it gently
+again and again. Rebecca's startled eyes flew open. In that instant was
+born inspiration in the brain of Aunt Olivia. She thought of an appeal
+to make.
+
+"Do you want ME to starve, too? Right here before your face and eyes? I
+haven't eat a mouthful since you did, and I shan't till you DO."
+
+Rebecca Mary slid to the floor with a soft thud of little brown, bare
+feet. Slow comprehension dawned in her eyes. "Are your---- did you say
+YOU was starving, too?"
+
+"Yes"--grimly.
+
+"Does it hurt you--too?"
+
+"Yes"--unsteadily.
+
+"VERY much?"
+
+"YES."
+
+"Why don't you eat something?"
+
+"Because you don't. I'm waiting for you to."
+
+"Shan't you ever?"
+
+"Not if you don't."
+
+Rebecca Mary caught her breath in a sob. "Shall I be--to blame?" She was
+moving towards the door now. With an irresistible impulse Aunt Olivia
+gathered her in her arms, and covered her lean little face with kisses.
+
+"You poor little thing! You poor little thing! You poor little thing!"
+over and over.
+
+Rebecca Mary gazed up into the softened face and read something there.
+It took her breath away. She could not believe it without further proof.
+
+"You don't--I don't suppose you LOVE me?" panted Rebecca Mary. But Aunt
+Olivia was gone out of the room in a swirl of white nightgown.
+
+"Everything's on the table," she called back from the stairs. "I'm going
+to light a fire. You come right down. I think it's high time--" her
+voice trailing out thinly.
+
+"She does," murmured Rebecca Mary, radiant of face.
+
+At half past twelve o'clock they both ate supper, both in their scant,
+white nightgowns, both very hungry indeed. But before she sat down in
+her old place at the table, Rebecca Mary went round to Aunt Olivia's
+place and whispered something rather shyly in her ear. She had been by
+herself in a corner of the room for a moment.
+
+"I've sewed the hundred and twoth," Rebecca Mary whispered.
+
+
+
+
+The Thousand Quilt
+
+
+"Good afternoon," Rebecca Mary said, politely.
+
+The minister's wife was cutting little trousers out of big ones--the
+minister's big ones. It was the old puzzle of how to steer clear of the
+thin places.
+
+"Boys grow so!" sighed, tenderly, the minister's wife, over her work.
+She had not heard the voice from the doorway.
+
+"Good afternoon"--again.
+
+It was a quaint little figure in tight red calico standing there.
+It might easily have stepped down from some old picture on the wall.
+Rebecca Mary had a bundle in her arms. It was so large that it obscured
+breast and face, and only a pair of grave blue eyes, presided over by
+thin, light brows, seemed visible to the minister's wife. The trousers
+puzzle merged into this one. Now who could--
+
+"Oh! Oh, it's Miss Plummer's little girl Rebecca," she said, cordially.
+
+"Rebecca Mary her NIECE," came, a little muffled, from behind the great
+bundle.
+
+"Rebecca Mary's niece---- Oh, you mean Miss Plummer's niece, and your
+whole name is that! But I suppose she calls you Rebecca or Becky, for
+short? Walk in, Rebecca."
+
+But Rebecca Mary was struggling with the paralyzing vision of Aunt
+Olivia calling her Becky. She had passed by the lesser wonder of being
+called Rebecca without the Mary.
+
+"Oh no'm, indeed; Aunt 'Livia never shortens me," gently gasped the
+child. And the minister's wife, measuring from the bundle down, smiled
+to herself. There did not seem much room for shortening.
+
+"But walk in, dear--you're going to walk in? I hope you have come to
+make me a little call?"
+
+Rebecca Mary struggled out of her paralysis. Here was occasion for new
+embarrassment. For Rebecca Mary was honest.
+
+"N-o'm I mean, not a LITTLE call. I've come to spend the afternoon," she
+said, slowly, "and I've brought my work."
+
+The bundle--the great bundle--was her work! She advanced into the room
+and began carefully to unroll it. It was the turn of the minister's wife
+to be paralyzed. She pushed forward a chair, and the child sat down in
+it.
+
+"It's my Thousand Quilt that I'm making for Aunt 'Livia," explained
+Rebecca Mary. "It's 'most done. There's a thousand pieces in it, and I'm
+on the nine hundred and ninety-oneth. I thought proberly you'd have some
+work, so I brought mine."
+
+"Yes, I see--" The minister's wife stood looking down at the tight
+little red figure among the gorgeous waves of the Thousand Quilt. They
+eddied and surged around it in dizzy reds and purples and greens. She
+was conscious of being a little seasick, and for relief she turned back
+to the puzzle of the little trousers. It had been in her mind at first
+to express sorrow at Rhoda's being unfortunately away--and the boys. Now
+she was glad she hadn't, for it was quite plain enough that the visitor
+had not come to spend the afternoon with the minister's children, but
+with the minister's wife.
+
+"It isn't she that's young--it's I," thought the minister's wife, with
+kind, laughing eyes. "She's old enough to be my mother." "How old are
+you, dear?" she added, aloud.
+
+"Me? I guess you mean Aunt 'Livia, don't you? It's Aunt 'Livia's
+birthday I'm making it for, it's going to be a present. Once she gave me
+a present on my birthday."
+
+Once!--the minister's wife remembered Rhoda's birthdays and the boys'.
+Taken altogether, such a host of little birthdays! But this little old,
+old visitor seemed to have had but one.
+
+"My birthday is two days quicker than Aunt 'Livia's is," volunteered
+the visitor, sociably. "We're 'most twins, you see. Aunt 'Livia
+was fifty-six that time she gave me the present. She's agoing to be
+fifty-nine when I give her this quilt--it's taken me ever since to make
+it."
+
+The minister's wife looked up from her cutting. So Rebecca Mary was only
+fifty-nine!
+
+"It's quite a long quilt," sighed Rebecca Mary. But pride woke in her
+eyes as she gazed out on the splendors of the green and purple sea.
+"A Thousand Quilt has so many stitches in it, but when you sew'em all
+yourself--when you sew every single stitch--" The pride in Rebecca
+Mary's grave blue eyes grew and grew.
+
+"Robert," the minister's wife said that night to the minister, "it's an
+awful quilt, but you ought to have seen her eyes! It's taken her three
+years to make it--maybe you wouldn't be proud yourself!"
+
+"Maybe YOU wouldn't, if Rhoda had made it."
+
+"RHODA! Robert, she sewed one square of patchwork once and it made
+her sick. I had to put her to bed. Speaking of 'once' reminds me--once
+Rebecca Mary had a birthday present, Robert." She waited a little
+anxiously for him to understand. The minister always understood, but
+sometimes he made her wait.
+
+"Felicia, are you trying to make me cry?" he said, and she was
+satisfied. She went across to him, as she always did when she wanted
+to cry herself. The floor was strewn with the tiniest boy's engine and
+cars, and she remembered, as she zigzagged among them, that they had
+been one of his very last birthday presents.
+
+"It was--Robert, what do you think the present was? I'll give you three
+guesses, but I advise you to guess a rooster."
+
+"Thomas Jefferson," murmured the minister, as one who was acquainted.
+
+"Yes, that is his name. How did you remember? She is very fond of
+him--he is her intimatest friend, she says. So she is under great
+obligations to her aunt. It's a large quilt, but it's none too large to
+'cover' Thomas Jefferson. I'm going to help her buy a lining and cotton
+batting."
+
+"Cracked corn will make a good lining, but cotton bat--"
+
+"Robert, this is not a comedy! If you'd seen Rebecca Mary, and the
+quilt, you'd call it a tragedy. You couldn't surprise me any if you told
+me she'd quilted it herself!"
+
+Down the road from Aunt Olivia's farm, across its southern boundary
+fence, romped and shouted all day long the Tony Trumbullses. No one,
+except possibly their mother, was quite certain how many of them there
+were; it was a dizzy process to take their census. They were never
+still, in little brown bare limbs nor shrill voices. From sunup to
+sundown the Tony Trumbullses raced and laughed. Certainly they were
+happy.
+
+The minister's wife had not dared to tell her Caller of the afternoon
+that the minister's children were down there shouting and racing with
+the little Tony Trumbullses. Dear, no!--not after Rebecca Mary in the
+course of conversation had said that Aunt Olivia did not countenance the
+Tony Trumbullses. Rebecca Mary did not say "countenance," but it meant
+that.
+
+"Her aunt won't let her play with them, Robert. And she'd like to--you
+needn't tell me Rebecca Mary wouldn't like to! I saw it in her poor
+little solemn eyes. Besides, she said she asked her aunt once to
+let her. Robert, aunts are cruel; I never knew it before. They've no
+business bringing up little Rebecca Marys!"
+
+"My dear! Felicia!" But in the minister's eyes was agreement.
+
+Aunt Olivia took afternoon naps with punctilious regularity--Aunt Olivia
+herself was punctilious regularity. At half past one, day upon day,
+she hung out the dish towel, hung up her kitchen apron, and walked with
+unswerving course into her bedroom. There, disposed upon the dainty bed
+in rigid lines of unrest, she rested. The naps were often long ones.
+
+A little after the afternoon that Rebecca Mary spent at the minister's
+the birthday quilt was finished. The thousandth tiny piece was neatly
+over-'n'-overed to its gorgeous expanse. But Rebecca Mary was not
+content. She longed to make it complete. She wanted to surprise Aunt
+'Livia with it, as Aunt 'Livia on that momentous birthday of her own had
+surprised her with the little fluff-ball of yellow down that had grown
+into Thomas Jefferson. That had been such a beautiful surprise, but
+this--Aunt 'Livia had seen the quilt so many, many times! She had taught
+Rebecca Mary's stiff little fingers to set the first stitches in it; she
+had made her rip out this purple square and that pink-checked one, and
+this one and that one and that. Oh, Aunt 'Livia was ACQUAINTED with the
+quilt! It would not be much of a surprise.
+
+But Rebecca Mary set her little pointed chin between her little brown
+palms and pondered, and out of the pondering grew a plan so ambitious
+and so daring that Rebecca Mary gasped in the throes of it. But she
+held her ground and entertained it intrepidly. She even grew on friendly
+terms with it in the end. Here was a way to surprise Aunt 'Livia;
+Rebecca Mary would do it! That it would entail an almost endless amount
+of work did not daunt her: Rebecca Mary was a Plummer, and Plummers were
+not to be daunted. The long vista of patient hours of trying labor that
+the plan opened up before her set her blood tingling like a warrior's on
+the eve of battle. What were long, patient hours to a Plummer? Rebecca
+Mary girded up her loins and went to meet them.
+
+Thereafter at Aunt Olivia's nap times Rebecca Mary disappeared. Day
+upon day, week upon week, she stole quietly away when the door of Aunt
+Olivia's bedroom shut. The first time she went oddly loaded down with
+what would have appeared--if there had been any one for it to "appear"
+to be a bundle of long sticks. She made two trips into the unknown that
+first day. The second time the bundle looked much like that one over
+which her grave blue eyes had peered at the minister's wife when she
+went to spend the afternoon with her.
+
+It was spring when the mysterious disappearances began. It was summer
+before Aunt Olivia woke up--not from her nap, but from her inattention.
+Quite suddenly she came upon the realization that Rebecca Mary was
+not about the house; nor about the grounds, for she instituted prompt
+search. She went to all the child's odd little haunts--the grapery,
+the orchard, the corn-house, even to her own beloved back yard, full of
+sweet-scented hiding-nooks dear to a child, but sacred ground to Aunt
+Olivia. Rebecca Mary sometimes did her "stents" there as a special
+privilege; she might be there now, unprivileged. Aunt Olivia's back yard
+was almost as full of flowery delights to Rebecca Mary as it was to Aunt
+Olivia.
+
+The child was not there--not anywhere. Aunt Olivia sought for Thomas
+Jefferson to inquire of him, but Thomas Jefferson was missing too. She
+went the rounds again. Where could the child be?
+
+It was a hot, stinging day in late June when Aunt Olivia's suspicions
+awoke. They had been long in rousing, but, once alert, they developed
+rapidly into certainties. Her pale eyes glistened, her thin nostrils
+dilated--Aunt Olivia's whole lean, sharp, unemotional person put on
+suspicion. The child had gone to see the Tony Trumbullses.
+
+"My land!" ejaculated Aunt Olivia, "after all my forbidding! And she a
+Plummer!" She sat down suddenly as though a little faint. She had never
+known a Plummer to disobey before; it was a new experience. It took time
+to get used to it, and she sat still a long time, rigid and grim, on the
+edge of the chair. Then as suddenly as she had sat down she got up. It
+could not be--she refused to entertain the suspicion longer. Rebecca
+Mary had NOT gone there to that forbidden place; she was in the garden
+somewhere. Aunt Olivia, a little stiff as if from a chill, went once
+more in search of the child.
+
+"Rebecca! Rebecca Mary!" she called, at regular intervals. Then sharply,
+"Rebecca Mary Plummer!" Her voice had thin cadences of suspicion lurking
+in it against its will.
+
+But there seemed really no doubt. One by one incriminating
+circumstances occurred to Aunt Olivia. Rebecca Mary had longed to go so
+much; the Tony Trumbullses, one at a time or in a tumultuous body, had
+urged her so often; she herself had more than once caught the child
+gazing wistfully, in passing by, at the bewildering, deafening, frolics
+of the little Tony Trumbullses. Once Rebecca Mary had asked to go
+barefoot, as they went. Once she had let out the tight little braids
+in her neck and rumpled her thin little hair. Once Aunt Olivia had come
+upon her PLAYING. The remembrance of it now tightened the lines around
+Aunt Olivia's lips. The child had been running wildly about the yard,
+shouting in a strange, excited, ridiculous way. When Aunt Olivia in
+stern displeasure had demanded explanations, she had run on recklessly,
+calling back over her shoulder: "Don't stop me! I'm a Tony Trumbull!"
+
+"My land!" breathed Aunt Olivia, taking back the suspicion to her
+breast. "After all my forbidding she's gone down there. She's BEEN going
+down there dear knows how long. She's waited till I took my naps an'
+then went. A PLUMMER!"
+
+There was really nowhere else she could have gone. She had never wanted
+to go anywhere else, except to the minister's, and Rebecca Mary was
+punctilious and would not think of going THERE again till the minister's
+wife had returned her visit.
+
+But Aunt Olivia waited. As usual, she went to her room next day at nap
+time and closed the door behind her. But when a little figure slipped
+down the road towards the forbidden place a moment later, she was
+watching behind her blinds. She was groaning as if in pain.
+
+The little figure began to run staidly. Aunt Olivia groaned again. The
+child was in a hurry to get there--she couldn't wait to walk! There was
+guilt in every motion of the little figure.
+
+"And she runs like a Plummer," groaned Aunt Olivia.
+
+The next day, and the next, Aunt Olivia watched behind her blinds. The
+fourth day she put on her afternoon dress and followed the hurrying
+little figure. Not at once--Aunt Olivia did not hurry. There was a sad
+reluctance in every movement. It seemed a terrible thing to be following
+Rebecca Mary--Rebecca Mary Plummer to a forbidden place.
+
+Afar off Aunt Olivia heard faintly the shoutings that always heralded an
+approach to the Tony Trumbullses, and shuddered. The tumult kept growing
+clearer; she thought she detected a wild, excited little shout that
+might be Rebecca Mary's. Her thin lips set into a stern, straight line.
+
+A splash of red caught Aunt Olivia's eye as she drew nearer the joyous
+whirl of little children. Rebecca Mary wore a little tight red dress.
+The coil seemed closing in about the child.
+
+Close to the southern boundary fence of Aunt Olivia's land stood an
+old empty barn. It had been a place for storing surplus hay, once, when
+there had been surplus hay. For many years now it had been empty. As
+Aunt Olivia approached it she noticed that its great sliding door was
+open. Strange, when for so long it had been shut!
+
+"If that old barn door ain't open!" breathed Aunt Olivia, stopping in
+her astonishment. "I ain't seen it open before in these ten years. Now,
+what I want to know is, who opened it? Likely as not those screeching
+little wild Injuns." She strode across the stubby grass-ground to the
+barn and peered into its cool, dim depths. Then Aunt Olivia uttered
+a little, bewildered cry. Gradually the dimness took on light and the
+whole startling picture within unfolded itself to her astonished eyes.
+
+Rebecca Mary was quilting. She was stooping earnestly over a gay expanse
+of purples and reds and greens. Her little tight red back was towards
+Aunt Olivia; it looked bent and strained. Rebecca Mary's eyes were very
+close to the gay expanse.
+
+Suddenly Rebecca Mary began to speak, and Aunt Olivia's widened eyes
+discovered a great, white rooster pecking about under the quilt. His
+big, snowy bulk stood out distinct in the shadow of it.
+
+"I'm glad we're 'most through. Aren't you, Thomas Jefferson? It's been a
+pretty LONG quilt. You get sort of tired when you quilt a LONG quilt. It
+makes your back creak when you unbend it; and when you quilt in a barn,
+of course you can't see without squinching, and it hurts your eyes to
+squinch."
+
+Silence again, except for the industrious peck-peck of the great white
+rooster. Aunt Olivia stood very still.
+
+"You've been a great help, Thomas Jefferson," began again the voice of
+Rebecca Mary, after a little. "I'm very much obliged to you, as I've
+said before. I don't know what I should have done without you. No, you
+needn't answer. I couldn't hear a word you said. You can't hear with
+cotton in both o' your ears," Rebecca Mary sighed. There was no cotton
+in Aunt Olivia's ears to shut out the soft little sound. "But of course
+you have to wear it in, on account o' your conscience. It's conscience
+cotton, Thomas Jefferson. I've explained before, but I don't know's you
+understood. It seems a little unpolite to wear it in my ears, with you
+here keeping me comp'ny. I s'pose you think it's un--unsociable. But
+Aunt Olivia doesn't allow me to 'sociate with the Tony Trumbullses. Oh,
+Thomas Jefferson, I wish she'd allow me to 'sociate!"
+
+Aunt Olivia found herself wishing she had conscience cotton in both o'
+her ears.
+
+"They're such nice, cheerful little children! It makes you want to
+go right over their fence and hollow too." Rebecca Mary pronounced
+it "hollow" with careful precision. Aunt Olivia would not approve
+of "holler." "And when you can't, you like to listen. But I s'posed
+listening to them hollow would be 'sociating. So I put the cotton in."
+
+The joyous "hollowing" broke in waves of glee on Aunt Olivia's eardrums.
+It seemed to be assaulting her heart. Oddly, now it did not sound
+unmannerly and dreadful. It sounded nice and cheerful. A Plummer, even,
+might be happy like that.
+
+"Cotton is a very strange ex--exper'ence, Thomas Jefferson," ran on the
+little voice. "At first you 'most can't stand it, but you get over the
+worst of it bymeby. Besides, we're getting 'most through now. Ain't that
+splendid, Thomas Jefferson? And it's pretty lucky, too, because Aunt
+'Livia's birthday is getting very near. It--it almost scares me. Doesn't
+it you? For I don't know how Aunt 'Livia looks when she's pleased--you
+think she'll look pleased, don't you, Thomas Jefferson? It's such a long
+quilt, and when you've sewed every stitch yourself--"
+
+If Rebecca Mary had turned round then she would have seen how Aunt
+Olivia looked when she was pleased. But the little figure at the
+quilting-frame bent steadily to its task, only another soft sigh
+stealing into Aunt Olivia's uncottoned ears. Thomas Jefferson pecked
+his way towards the open door, and the lean figure there started back
+guiltily; Aunt Olivia did not want to be recognized.
+
+"You there under the quilt, Thomas Jefferson?" The little voice put on
+tenderness. "Because I'm a-going to tell you something. Once Aunt 'Livia
+gave ME a birthday present and it was YOU. Such a little mite of a
+yellow chicken! That's why I'm making the quilt for Aunt 'Livia. It was
+three years ago; I've loved you ever since," added Rebecca Mary, simply.
+
+For an instant Aunt Olivia stopped being a Plummer. A sob crept into
+her throat. "Rebecca! Rebecca Mary! Rebecca Mary Plummer!" she cried,
+involuntarily. Then she stepped back hastily, glad for the cotton in
+Rebecca Mary's ears. For the surprise--she must not spoil the child's
+hard-earned surprise. And, besides, Aunt Olivia wanted to be surprised.
+
+It was a relief to get away. She could not look any longer at the
+picture in the great cobwebby barn--the gorgeous quilt spread out to
+its full extent, the empty scaffolds above Rebecca Mary stooping to her
+work, Thomas Jefferson pecking about the floor. Aunt Olivia was not old;
+through all the years ahead of her she would remember that picture.
+
+She went straight to the southern boundary fence and looked across
+at the jubilant little Tony Trumbullses. The one in a red dress like
+Rebecca Mary's she singled out with a pointing finger. "YOU come here,"
+she called. "I won't hurt you; no need to look scairt. Do you know who I
+am? I'm Rebecca Mary's aunt. You know who Rebecca Mary is, don't you?"
+
+"Gracious!" shrilled the little red Tony Trumbull, which Aunt Olivia
+took for yes.
+
+"Well, then, you know where I live. You see here--I want you all, the
+whole kit o' you, to come to my house tomorrow morning to see Rebecca
+Mary. I'm going to say it over again. Tomorrow morning, to see Rebecca
+Mary!" setting apart the syllables with the pointing finger. "You can
+play in my back yard," said Aunt Olivia, sublimely unconscious of slang.
+
+
+
+
+The Bible Dream
+
+
+
+Rebecca Mary sat on the kitchen steps, shelling peas and trying not
+to listen. She had begun a hummy little tune to help out, but in the
+interstices of rattling peas and the verses of the tune she could
+distinctly hear some of the things Aunt Olivia and the Caller were
+saying. This was one of the things:
+
+"She's offered a reward, but _I_ don't calculate there's much chance
+she'll ever see it again."
+
+A sigh followed. The voice was the Caller's, the sigh Aunt Olivia's.
+
+"It's queer where it ever went to!" Aunt Olivia's voice.
+
+"Yes, it's all o' QUEER," the Caller's, with mysterious hints in it that
+made Rebecca Mary, out on the doorsteps, shudder suddenly and forget
+where she was in the tune. Oh, oh, dear, did they s'pose--they couldn't
+s'pose it had been STOLEN?
+
+Rebecca Mary's little hard brown hand stopped halfway to the pea-basket
+and fell limply at her side on the doorstep. It made a little thud as
+it fell. Rebecca Mary's horrified gaze wandered out into the glare of
+sunshine where wandered Thomas Jefferson, stepping daintily, hunting
+bugs. That was his day's work. Thomas Jefferson was a hard worker.
+
+The voices went on, but Rebecca Mary did not heed them now; she was
+looking at Thomas Jefferson, but she did not see him. Not until--it
+happened. On a sudden Thomas Jefferson, forgetful of dignity, made a
+swoop for something that glittered in the grass. Then Rebecca Mary saw
+him--then started to her feet with an inarticulate little cry, while
+in her honest brown eyes the horror grew. Oh, oh, dear, what was that
+Thomas Jefferson had swooped for? For a brief instant it had glittered
+in the grass--Rebecca Mary knew in her soul that it had glittered.
+
+Thomas Jefferson stretched his sheeny neck, curved it ridiculously, and
+crowed. It sounded like a crow of triumph; that was the way he crowed
+when the bug had been a delicious one.
+
+The Caller was coming out, Aunt Olivia with her. Rebecca Mary could hear
+the crackle of their starched skirts; Aunt Olivia's crackled loudest.
+Rebecca Mary had always had a queer feeling that Aunt Olivia herself was
+starched. There had never been a time when she could not remember her
+carrying her head very stiffly and straight and never bending her back.
+Nobody else in the world, Rebecca Mary reflected proudly, could pick
+up a pin without bending. SHE couldn't, herself, even after she had
+privately practiced a good deal.
+
+"Good afternoon, Rebecca Mary; you out here?" the Caller nodded
+pleasantly. Folks had such queer ways of saying things. How could you
+say good afternoon to anybody if she WASN'T here?
+
+"Didn't you hear Mrs. Dixey, Rebecca Mary? I guess you've forgot your
+manners," came in Aunt Olivia's crisp tones.
+
+"Oh yes'm, I have. I mean I DID. Yes'm, thank you, I'm out here,"
+quavered Rebecca Mary. She was not afraid of the Caller and she had
+never been afraid of Aunt Olivia, but the horror that was settling round
+her heart made her clear little voice unsteady. Her eyes were still
+following Thomas Jefferson on his mincing travels about the yard. The
+sunshine was on his splendid white coat, but Rebecca Mary felt no pride
+in him.
+
+"Ain't that the han'somest rooster! You ought to show him at the fair, I
+declare! See how his feathers glisten in the sun!"
+
+"Thomas Jefferson belongs to Rebecca Mary," Aunt Olivia said, briefly.
+"She raised him."
+
+"My! Well, he's han'some enough. Ain't it amusing how a nice-feeling
+rooster like that will go stepping round as if he felt about too toppy
+to live! He'd ought to wear diamonds."
+
+"Oh, oh, dear, please don't!" breathed Rebecca Mary, softly, but neither
+of the women heard her.
+
+"Well, well, I must be going. I've made a regular visit. But I tell John
+when I get away from home, it feels so good I STAY! 'I don't get away
+any too often,' I says, 'and I guess I've earnt the right.' Well, I must
+be going if I'm ever going to! Good-bye, Miss Plummer--good-bye, Rebecca
+Mary. All is, I hope Mis' Avery's boarder'll find her diamond, don't
+you? But I don't calculate she will. Well, good afternoon. She hadn't
+ought to have wore the ring, when she knew it was loose in the setting
+like that. Some folks are just that careless! Well--"
+
+But Rebecca Mary did not hear the rest of the Caller's leave-taking. She
+had slipped away to Thomas Jefferson out in the sun.
+
+"Oh, come here--come here with me!" she cried, intensely. "Come out
+behind the barn where we can talk. I've got to say something to you
+that's awful! I've GOT to, you've got to listen, Thomas Jefferson."
+
+It was still and terribly hot in the treeless glare behind the barn, but
+it was all in the day's work to Thomas Jefferson. Behind the barn was a
+beautiful place for bugs.
+
+"Listen! Oh, you poor dear, you've got to listen!" Rebecca Mary cried.
+"You've got to stop hunting for bugs--and don't you dare to crow! If you
+crow, Thomas Jefferson, it will break my heart. I don't s'pose you know
+what you've done--I don't know as you've done it--but there's something
+awful happened. Oh, Thomas Jefferson, it glittered--I saw it glitter!"
+Suddenly Rebecca Mary stooped and gathered Thomas Jefferson into her
+arms. She held him with a passionate clasp against her flat little
+calico breast. He was HERS. He was all the intimate friend she had ever
+had. He had been her little downy baby and slept in her hand. She had
+fed him and watched him grow and been proud of him. He was her all.
+
+"Oh, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson, what was it that glittered in
+the grass? Tell me and I'll believe you. Say it was a little piece o'
+glass and I'll put you down and go get you some corn, and we'll never
+speak of it again. But don't look at me like that--don't look at me like
+that! You look--GUILTY!"
+
+She rocked him in her arms. In her soul she knew what it was that had
+glittered. But in Thomas Jefferson's soul--oh, they could not blame
+Thomas Jefferson!
+
+"You haven't got any soul, poor dear; poor dear, you haven't got any
+soul, and you can't be guilty without a soul. They couldn't--hang--you."
+Her voice sank to the merest whisper. She tightened her clasp on the
+great, soft body and smoothed the soft feathers with a tender, tremulous
+little hand.
+
+"The Lord didn't put anything in you but a stomach and a--a gizzard. He
+left your soul out and you're not to blame for that. I don't blame
+you, Thomas Jefferson, and of course the Lord don't. But Mrs. Avery's
+boarder--oh, oh, dear, I'm afraid Mrs. Avery's boarder will! You mustn't
+tell--I mean I mustn't. Nobody must know what it was that glittered in
+the grass. Do you want to be--searched?
+
+"You know 'xactly where she sat over to this house yesterday morning,
+when she went by--and how she said you were too sweet for anything--and
+how she flew her hand round with--with IT on it. You know as well as I
+do. And it was loose, the di'mond-stone was loose. We didn't either of
+us know that. We're not to blame if things are loose, and you're not to
+blame for not having any soul. But oh, oh, dear, how dreadfully it makes
+us both feel! You'd better give up crowing, Thomas Jefferson; I feel
+just as if you'd let it out if you crew."
+
+At tea Rebecca Mary played with her spoon, while her berries swam,
+untasted, in their yellow sea of cream. Aunt Olivia remonstrated.
+
+"Why don't you eat your supper, child?" she asked, sharply. Rebecca Mary
+was always glad when she said child instead of Rebecca Mary, for then
+the sharpness did not cut. She was feeling now for the glasses up in her
+thin gray hair. Aunt Olivia could see everything through those glasses
+and it made Rebecca Mary tremble to think--oh, oh, dear, suppose she
+should see the secret hidden in Rebecca Mary's soul! It seemed as if
+Aunt Olivia trained the glasses directly upon the corner where the
+secret glittered in the gra--was hidden in Rebecca Mary's troubled
+little soul. But this is what Aunt Olivia said:
+
+"It's your stomach. What you need is a good dose of camomile tea to
+tone you up. I didn't give you any this spring, for a wonder. Now you go
+right up to bed and I'll set some to steeping. Does it hurt you any?"
+
+"Oh yes'm," murmured Rebecca Mary, sadly, but she meant her soul and
+Aunt Olivia meant her stomach. She mounted the steep stairs to her
+little eavesdropping room and slipped her small spare body out of her
+clothes into her scant little nightgown. It was rather a relief to go to
+bed. If she could have been sure that Thomas Jefferson--but, no,
+Thomas Jefferson was not in bed. As Rebecca Mary lay and waited for her
+camomile tea she was certain she could hear him stepping about under the
+window. Once he came directly under and "crew," and then Rebecca Mary
+hid her head in the pillow for he was letting it out.
+
+"Cock-a-doodle-do--ooo, did-you-see-me-swoo-oo-OOP-it-up?" crowed Thomas
+Jefferson, under the window. Rebecca Mary with her eyes pillow-deep
+could see him stretching his neck and letting it out. It seemed to her
+everybody could hear him--Aunt Olivia downstairs, steeping camomile
+'blows, and Mrs. Avery's boarder across the fields.
+
+"Aunt Olivia," whispered Rebecca Mary, while she sipped her bitter tea
+a little later, "how much--I suppose precious things cost a great deal,
+don't they?"
+
+"My grief!" Aunt Olivia set down the bowl and felt of Rebecca Mary's
+temples, then of her wrists. The child was out of her head.
+
+"Di'mond-stones like--like that boarder's--I suppose those cost a great
+deal? As much as--how much as, Aunt Olivia?"
+
+"My grief, don't you worry about any di'mond-stones! YOU haven't lost
+any. What you'll lose will be your health, if you don't swallow down the
+rest o' this tea and go right to sleep like a good girl! No, no, I'm not
+going to answer any questions. Drink this; swallow it down."
+
+Rebecca Mary swallowed it down, but she did not go right to sleep like a
+good girl. She lay on the hard little bed and thought of many things, or
+of one thing many times. Over and over, wearily, drearily, until the sin
+of Thomas Jefferson became her sin. She adopted it.
+
+When at last she dropped to sleep it was to dream a Bible dream. Usually
+Rebecca Mary liked to dream Bible dreams, but not this one. This one was
+different. This one was of Abraham and Isaac. She thought she was right
+there and saw Abraham build the little altar and offer up--no, it wasn't
+Isaac! It was Thomas Jefferson. And the Abraham in her dream was turning
+into HER. The flowing white robes were dwindling to a little scant white
+nightgown. She stood a little way off and saw herself offering up Thomas
+Jefferson. It was a dreadful dream.
+
+The night was a perfectly black one, the kind that Rebecca Mary was
+afraid of. It was the only thing in the world she had ever been afraid
+of--a black night. But after the dream she got up stealthily and slipped
+through the blackness, out to Thomas Jefferson. It was only out to the
+little lean-to shed, but it seemed a very long way to Rebecca Mary.
+The blackness pressed up against her, she put out her little, trembling
+hands and pushed through it.
+
+"Thomas Jefferson! Thomas Jefferson!" she called softly. But he was a
+sound sleeper, she remembered; she would have to find him and wake him.
+In the darkness she felt about on Thomas Jefferson's perch for Thomas
+Jefferson. When the little groping hand came upon something very soft
+and warm, the other hand went up to join it, and together they lifted
+Thomas Jefferson down. He gave a protesting croak, and then, because he
+was acquainted with the clasp of the two small hands, and night or day
+liked it, he went back to his interrupted dreams and said not another
+word. Thomas Jefferson had never dreamed a Bible dream--never heard of
+Abraham or Isaac, had no soul to be disquieted.
+
+With her burden against her breast Rebecca Mary pushed back through the
+darkness, up to the black little room under the eaves. She felt about
+for her little carpet-covered shoe box and gently crowded the great
+white bulk into it. Then she crept back into bed and lay on the outer
+edge with her loving, light little hand on Thomas Jefferson's feathers.
+The trouble in her burdened soul poured itself out.
+
+"Oh, Thomas Jefferson," she whispered down to the heap of soft feathers,
+"I'm going to smooth you this way all night for tomorrow you die!" Her
+voice even in a whisper had a solemn, inspired note. "There's no other
+way; you'll have to make up your mind to be willing. It's going to break
+my heart, and, oh, I'm afraid it will break yours! I'm afraid it will
+kill us both!"
+
+Thomas Jefferson uttered a mournful little croaky sound that might have
+been "ET TU, BRUTE?" It pierced Rebecca Mary's breast. "There, hush,
+poor dear, poor dear, and rest. You'll need all your sleep," she crooned
+softly and brokenly. "Tomorrow morning I'll give you some beautiful
+corn, and then--and then I'm going to take you to Mrs. Avery's boarder
+and tell her the worst. I'm going to give you up, Thomas Jefferson; and
+I'm the best friend you've got in the world! But I've got to, I've got
+to--I've got to! It's been revealed to me in a dream. There was a man
+once in the Bible, named Abraham, and there was his dearly beloved
+little boy named Isaac. And now here's me named Rebecca Mary, and
+dearly beloved you named Thomas Jefferson. Oh, I don't suppose you can
+understand; I suppose you're asleep. You'll never know how it feels to
+give up your dearly belovedest, but oh, oh, dear, you'll know how it
+feels to be given up! You'll be one o' the blessed martyrs, Thomas
+Jefferson--doesn't that comfort you a little speck? Oh, why don't you
+wake up and be comforted?
+
+"The Lord excused Abraham, after all. But this isn't the Lord, it's Mrs.
+Avery's boarder. I'm afraid she isn't the Lord's kind--I'm afraid not,
+Thomas Jefferson. I don't dare to let you hope; I've got to prepare you
+for the worst."
+
+She caught up the big, white fellow with sudden, irresistible yearning
+and sat up with him and rocked him back and forth in her arms. She began
+a muffled, sad little tune like a wail. The words were terrible words.
+
+"I'll hold you in my arms. I'll rock you--rock you--rock you. For
+tomorrow, oh, to-MOR-row you--must--die! Aber-a-ham offered Isaac, and
+_I_-MUST OFFER YOU."
+
+Over and over, then tenderly she lowered Thomas Jefferson to the shoe
+box again.
+
+When Aunt Olivia came up in the morning, vaguely alarmed because it
+was so late and no Rebecca Mary stirring, she had news to tell. Someone
+going by had told her something.
+
+"Well, that woman's found her 'di'mond-stone,'--how are you feeling this
+morning, child? It was in her pocket where she'd put her hand in and
+felt round! So all that fuss for noth--"
+
+Suddenly Aunt Olivia stopped, for without warning, out of a box at the
+bedside stalked a great white rooster and flew to the foot board and
+"crew":
+
+
+  "Cock-a-doodle-do-ooo!
+  It was glass that glittered in the grass,
+  And all the time I knew-oo-ooo!"
+
+"My grief?" Aunt Olivia gasped.
+
+
+
+
+The Cookbook Diary
+
+
+
+Rebecca Mary decided to keep a diary. It was not an inspiration, though
+it was rather like one in its suddenness. Of course she had always known
+that Aunt Olivia kept a diary. When she was very small she had stretched
+a-tiptoe and with little pointing forefinger counted rows and rows of
+little black books that Aunt Olivia had "kept." Each little black book
+had its year-label pasted neatly on the back. Rebecca Mary breathed
+deep breaths of awe, there were so many of them. There must be so much
+weather in those little black books--so many pleasant days, rainy days,
+storms, and snows!
+
+It was Rebecca Mary who remembered that it was Tuesday, and that it had
+showered a little Wednesday--shone Thursday--showered again on Friday.
+Rebecca Mary was the jog to Aunt Olivia's memory. It gave her now, at
+the beginning of her own diary career, an experienced feeling, as if she
+knew already how to keep a diary. It made it seem a much simpler matter
+to begin.
+
+And then, of course, the minister's littlest little boy--really it was
+the minister's littlest little boy who had started Rebecca Mary. He had
+volunteered a peep into his own diary, and made whispered explanations
+and suggestions. He let Rebecca Mary read some of the entries: "MUNDY,
+plesent and good. TUSDY, rany and bad. WENSDY, sum plesent and not
+good enuf to hirt. THIRSDY" but he had hastily withdrawn the book at
+"Thirsdy," and a tidal-wave of warm red blood had flowed up over his
+little brown ears and in around all the little brown islands of his
+freckles. So Rebecca Mary had begun hastily to talk of other things.
+For the minister's littlest little boy had explained that the first
+Statement in each entry referred to the weather and the second to the
+deportment of the writer, and Rebecca Mary had remarked a sympathetic
+resemblance between the two statements. She had caught a fleeting
+glimpse of the weather part of "Thirsdy"--she could guess the rest.
+Better let the curtain fall on "Thirsdy." On her way home Rebecca Mary
+decided to keep a diary herself. Her first day's record had been a good
+deal like the "Mundy" of the minister's littlest little boy, only there
+were more a's in the weather. After that, little by little, she branched
+out into a certain originality--the Rebecca Mary sort. If she had
+not been hampered by circumstances, it would have been easier to be
+original. The most hampering circumstance was the cookbook itself, which
+she was driven to use in her new undertaking. There was room on the
+blank leaves and above and below the recipes for cake and pudding
+and pie. The book was one Aunt Olivia had given her long ago to draw
+impossible pictures in.
+
+In the beginning Rebecca Mary tried pasting pieces of "empty" paper
+over the pies and puddings and cakes, but the empty paper was too
+transparent. In rather startling places things were liable to show
+through.
+
+As: "SUNDAY.--It rained a level teaspoonful. Aunt Olivia and I went to
+church. The text was thou shalt not steal 1 cups of sour milk--" Rebecca
+Mary got no farther than that. She was a little appalled at the result
+thus far, and hastily turned a page and began again in a blank space
+where no intrusive pudding could break through and corrupt. Thereafter
+she wrote above and below the recipes and pasted no more thin veils over
+them. It seemed safer.
+
+Aunt Olivia, apparently oblivious to what was going on, yet saw and did
+not disapprove. It was to be expected that the child should come into
+her inheritance sometime, early or late. If early--well.
+
+"It's the Plummer in her. All the Plummers have kept diaries," Aunt
+Olivia mused, knitting stolidly on while the child stooped painfully
+to her self-imposed task. The quaint resemblance to herself at her own
+diary-writing did not escape her, and she smiled a little in the Aunt
+Olivia way that scarcely stirred her lips. Aunt Olivia smiled oftener
+now when she looked at the child. She was "failing" a little, Plummerly.
+Between the two of them, little Plummer and big, stretched of late a tie
+woven of sheets and a gorgeous quilt of a thousand bits. It was not very
+visible to the naked eye, but they were both rather shyly conscious that
+it was there. They would never be quite so far apart again.
+
+Rebecca Mary took her diary out to the haunts of Thomas Jefferson and
+read aloud selections to him, with an odd, conscious little air, as
+though she were graduating. The great white fellow was a sympathetic
+auditor, if silence and extreme gravity count. Only once did he ever
+make comments, and Rebecca Mary could never quite make up her mind
+whether he laughed then or applauded. When a great white rooster
+elongates his neck, crooks it ridiculously, flaps his wings and crows,
+it's hard telling exactly what feeling prompts him. But Rebecca reasoned
+from past experience and her faith in him--he had never laughed at her
+before. It was applause. The especial entry which evoked it was the one
+that first mentioned an allowance.
+
+"'THURSDAY.--I think I'm going to--'" read Rebecca Mary slowly; and it
+was significant that on this Thursday there was no weather. "'I havent
+desided--I don't KNOW, but I think I'm going to ask Aunt Olivia to pay
+me 5 cents a weak. Rhoda says you call it an alowance, and I supose she
+knows. She is the minnister's daughter. She has 10 cents a weak unless
+shes bad and then she pays the minnister an alowance. He charges her 1
+cent a sin and he gives it to somebody who is indignant--I think Rhoda
+said indignant. Then I should think he would give it back to Rhoda. I
+shant only ask Aunt Olivia for 5 cents--I think she will be more likely.
+I havent desided but I THINK I shall ask her tomorrow after her knap.
+After knaps you are more rested and maybe things don't look just as they
+do before knaps.
+
+"'FRIDAY.--I think Ide better wait untill tomorrow. Her knap was rather
+short. Ive desided to say you needent alow but 4 if 5 is too mutch. If
+she alows Im going to buy me some crimpers. Rhodas curls natchurally but
+she says you can crimp it if it doesent. I have begun to look at myself
+in the glass and it fritens me--I guess there ought to be a gh in
+that--to see how homebly I am. I wonder if it doesent kind of scare Aunt
+Olivia. Prehaps if I was pretty like Rhoda she would call me darling and
+dear instead of Rebecca Mary. I dont blame her mutch because I LOOK like
+Rebecca Mary.
+
+"'SATURDAY.--I think Sunday will be the best time to ask her, just
+after she gets home from meeting and has rolled her bonnet strings up,
+espesialy if the minnister preaches on the Lord lovething a cheerful
+giver. I am hopeing he will. If I dont get the crimpers Ime going to
+give up looking in the glass. For I think Ime growing homeblyer right
+along. Theres something the matter with my nose. Rhodas doesent run up
+hill. I never thought about noses before. Aunt Olivias is a little quear
+too but I like it became its Aunt Olivias nose. I wish I knew if Aunt
+Olivia liked mine. I wish we were better akquainted.
+
+"'SUNDAY.--I wish the Lord had created mine curly because I dont dass
+to ask Aunt Olivia. I don't dass to, so there. It scares my throat. I
+supose its because aunts arnt mothers--seems as if youd dass to ask your
+MOTHER. I hate to be scart on acount of being a Plummer. Im afraid Im
+the only Plummer that ever was--'"
+
+The reading suddenly stopped here. This was Sunday, and the last entry
+was fresh from Rebecca Mary's pencil.
+
+"Thomas Jefferson!" stormed Rebecca Mary, in a little gust of passion,
+"don't you ever TELL I was scared! As long as you live!--cross your
+heart!--oh, I wish I hadn't read that part to you! You're a Plummer too,
+and you never were scared, and you can't understand--"
+
+The diary was clutched to Rebecca Mary's little flat breast, and with a
+swirl of starched Sunday skirts the child was gone. She went straight
+to Aunt Olivia. Red spots of shame flamed in both sallow little cheeks;
+resolution sat astride her little uphill nose. She could not bear to go,
+but it was easier than being ashamed. The pointing fingers of all the
+Plummers pushed her on. Go she must, or be a coward. Long ago--it seemed
+long to Rebecca Mary--she had stood up straight and stanch and refused
+to make any more sheets. Was that little girl who had dared, THIS little
+girl who was afraid? Should that little girl be ashamed of this one?
+
+"Aunt Olivia," steadily, though Rebecca Mary's heart was pounding
+hard--"Aunt Olivia, are--are you well off?"
+
+She had not meant to begin like that, but afterwards she was glad that
+she had.
+
+"My grief!" Aunt Olivia ejaculated in her surprise. What would the child
+ask next? "Am I well off? If you mean rich, no, I ain't."
+
+"Oh! Then you're--why, I didn't think about your being poor! I shouldn't
+have thought of asking--that makes a great difference. I never thought
+of THAT!"
+
+She was off before Aunt Olivia had fully recovered her breath, and
+the stumping of her heavy little shoes going upstairs was the only
+distinctly audible sound. In her own room Rebecca Mary stopped, panting.
+
+"Oh, I'm glad I didn't get as far as ASKING!" she breathed aloud. "I
+never thought about her being poor--of course then I wouldn't ask!"
+
+But she squared her shoulders and stood up, straight and unashamed. For
+she had vindicated herself. She had been ready to ask. She could look
+that other little girl of the sheets in the face. The Other Little Girl
+was there, coming to meet her as she advanced to the little looking
+glass above the table. But Rebecca Mary waved her back peremptorily.
+
+"Go right back!" she said. "I only came to tell you I wasn't a
+coward--that's all. Good-bye. For I'm not coming any more. You're sorry
+I'm homely, and I'm sorry you are, but it doesn't do any good for us to
+look at each other and groan. It will make us unsatisfied. So I shall
+turn you back to the wall--good-bye."
+
+But for a very [long] instant they looked sadly into each other's
+little lean brown-yellow faces. It was a brief ceremony of farewell.
+"Good-bye," smiled Rebecca Mary, bravely. And the lips of The Other
+Little Girl moved as though saying it too. The Other Little Girl smiled.
+And neither of them knew that just then she was beautiful.
+
+Aunt Olivia was trying to meet her own courage test. She had been trying
+a good many days. Duty--stern, unswerving duty--bade her inspect Rebecca
+Mary's little cookbook diary. Should she not know--ought she not to know
+the thoughts that were brewing in the child's mind? How else could she
+bring her up properly?
+
+"Read it," Duty said, "find out. Are you afraid?"
+
+"I'm ashamed," groaned Aunt Olivia. "Do you think Rebecca Mary would
+read my diary?"
+
+"Is Rebecca Mary bringing you up?"
+
+Aunt Olivia sometimes thought so. The puzzle that she had begun to try
+to solve when Rebecca Mary's white, death-struck mother had laid her
+baby in Aunt Olivia's unaccustomed arms was getting a little more
+difficult every day. Some days Aunt Olivia wondered if she ought to give
+it up. Oh, this bringing up--this bringing up of little children!
+
+"If I must," groaned Aunt Olivia, and got as far as taking the little
+diary in her hands. But she got no farther. She laid it gently down
+again.
+
+"I can't," she said, firmly, but she could not look Duty in the face as
+she said it. She had always listened to Duty before.
+
+"You know you ought to--"
+
+"Yes, I know, but I can't! It seems a shameful thing to do. I'm sure
+I've tried often enough--you know I've tried--"
+
+"I know--that was good practice. Now stop trying and read it!"
+
+Aunt Olivia flamed up. "I tell you I won't! It's a shameful thing. If
+I found Rebecca Mary reading one of my diaries, I should send her to
+bed--"
+
+"Read hers and go to bed yourself. It's your duty to read it. When you
+bring up a child--"
+
+"I never will again!"
+
+Aunt Olivia read it, with the relentless grip of Duty holding her to the
+task. But flame spots crept up through the sallow of her thin cheeks and
+made what atonement they could.
+
+It did not take long, though some of the pages she read twice. The
+weatherless week, when Rebecca Mary had put off her "asking" from day to
+day, Aunt Olivia went back to the third time. When she closed the little
+book it was not a Plummer face she lifted it to and laid it against for
+the space of a breath--a Plummer face would not have been wet.
+
+Then she Whirled upon Duty. "Well, I've done it--I hope you're
+satisfied!"
+
+"It had to be done," calm Duty responded. "If you think it will make you
+feel any better, you can send yourself to bed."
+
+"I'm going to," sighed Aunt Olivia, slipping away to her room. A strange
+little yearning was upon her to hunt up Rebecca Mary and call her
+darling and dear. But in her heart she knew she should not have the
+courage to do it. Here was another Plummer coward!
+
+"Why are some people made like me?" she thought--"so it kills 'em to
+say anything anyways tenderish. Seems to be too much for their vocal
+organs--they'd rather do a week's washing!"
+
+Other thoughts came to Aunt Olivia as she lay on her bed, doing her
+whimsical penance for violating the sanctity of the little old cookbook.
+She was not comfortable. It was a hard bed--nothing was soft of Aunt
+Olivia's. She moved about on it uneasily.
+
+"When they're dead, we're willing enough to say tenderish things to
+'em," her musings ran. "We wish we HAD then. I suppose if Rebecca Mary
+was--"
+
+She got no farther for the sudden horror that was upon her--that sent
+her to her feet and to the door. But there she stopped in the blessed
+relief that drifted in to her on a child's laugh. Somewhere out there
+Rebecca Mary was laughing in her subdued, sweet way. A cracked, shrill
+crow followed--Thomas Jefferson was laughing too.
+
+Rebecca Mary was not dead. There was time to say a "tenderish" thing to
+her before she lay--before that. Aunt Olivia shut her eyes resolutely to
+the vision that had intruded upon her musings. It was Rebecca Mary who
+was laughing somewhere out there that she wanted to see.
+
+The next day was Sunday, and in the quiet of the long afternoon Rebecca
+Mary read aloud again to Thomas Jefferson. It was from the little
+cookbook diary. Thomas Jefferson was pecking about the long grass of the
+orchard.
+
+"Oh, listen!" cried Rebecca Mary, her eyes unwontedly shining. "Listen
+to this, Thomas Jefferson!
+
+"'SATURDAY.--Wind northwest by Mrs. Tupper's Weather vain. Something
+happened yesterday. Aunt Olivia didn't say it, but she most did.
+She came right out of her bedroom and I saw it in her face!
+"Dear"--"darling,"--they were both there, and she was looking at me!
+Nobody EVER looked "dear" "darling" at me before. I suppose my mother
+would have. If I hadent had another mother I think I should like to have
+had Aunt Olivia.
+
+"'You feel that way more after you get akquainted. When I get VERY
+akquainted prehaps I shall tell Aunt Olivia. Its quear, I think, how it
+isent as easy to say some things as it is to think them. You can wright
+them easier too. I am glad Ime keeping a diary because I can wright
+about yesterday and what happenned. I shall read it to my grand
+children--to be continude.
+
+"'SUNDAY'--that's today, Thomas Jefferson,--'SUNDAY.--This is yesterday
+continude, because there was too mutch for one day. Something else
+beutiful happenned. My Aunt Olivia said to me as folows, I have desided
+to pay you a weakly alowance of 10 cents a weak Rebecca Mary. And I
+never asked her to. And she never said anything about charging me for
+my sins. I was going to ask her but I found out she was poor. That was a
+mistake, she isent. She must be SOME well of I think for 10 cents seams
+a great deal to have of your own every weak. But I shant buy crimpers.
+Ime going to buy a present for Aunt Olivia byamby. Ime very happy. I
+wish I knew how to spell hooray.'"
+
+Suddenly Rebecca Mary was on her feet, waving the cookbook jubilantly.
+
+"Hoo-ray! Hoo-ray! Thomas Jefferson!" she shouted, surprising the gentle
+Sunday calm. She surprised Thomas Jefferson, too, but he was equal to
+the occasion--Thomas Jefferson was a gentleman.
+
+"Hoo-ra-a-a-ay!" he crowed, splendidly, with a fine effect of clapping
+his hands.
+
+This time there could be no doubt. This was applause.
+
+
+
+
+The Bereavement
+
+
+
+Thomas Jefferson was losing his appetite. Even Aunt Olivia noticed it,
+but it did not worry her as it did Rebecca Mary.
+
+"He's always had as many appetites as a cat's got lives--he's got eight
+good ones left," she said, calmly.
+
+But Rebecca Mary was not calm. It seemed to her that Thomas Jefferson
+was getting thinner every day.
+
+"Oh, I can feel your bones!" she cried, in distress. "Your bones are
+coming through, you poor, dear Thomas Jefferson! Won't you eat just one
+more kernel of corn--just this one for Rebecca Mary? I'd do it for you.
+Shut your eyes and swallow it right down and you'll never know it."
+
+That day Thomas Jefferson listened to pleading, but not the next
+day--nor the next. He went about dispiritedly, and the last few times
+that he crowed it made Rebecca Mary cry. Even Aunt Olivia shook her
+head.
+
+"I could do it better than that myself," she said, soberly.
+
+Rebecca Mary hunted bugs and angleworms and arranged them temptingly in
+rows, but the big, white rooster passed them by with a feeble peck
+or two. Bits of bread failed to tempt him, or even his favorite cooky
+crumbs. His eighth appetite departed--his seventh, sixth, fifth, fourth.
+
+"He lost his third one yesterday," lamented Rebecca Mary, "and today
+he's lost his second. It's pretty bad when he hasn't only one left, Aunt
+Olivia."
+
+"Pretty bad," nodded Aunt Olivia. She was stirring up a warm mush.
+When Rebecca Mary had gone upstairs she took it to Thomas Jefferson
+and commanded him to eat. He was beyond coaxing--perhaps he needed
+commanding.
+
+Rebecca Mary thought Aunt Olivia did not care, and it added a new sting
+to her pain. There was that time that Aunt Olivia said she wished the
+Lord hadn't ever created roosters--Thomas Jefferson had just scratched
+up her pansy seeds. And the time when she wished Thomas Jefferson was
+dead; did she wish that now? Was she--was she glad he was going to be
+dead?
+
+For Rebecca Mary had given up hope. She was not reconciled, but she was
+sure. She spent all her spare time with the big, gaunt, pitiful fellow,
+trying to make his last days easier. She knew he liked to have her with
+him.
+
+"You do, don't you, dear?" she said. She had never called him "dear"
+before. She realized sadly that this was her last chance. "You do like
+to have me here, don't you? You'd rather? Don't try to crow--just nod
+your head a little if you do." And the big, white fellow's head had
+nodded a little, she was sure. She put out her loving little brown hand
+and caressed it. "I knew you did, dear. Oh, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas
+Jefferson, don't die! PLEASE don't--think of the good times we'll
+have if you won't! Think of the--the grasshoppers--the bugs, Thomas
+Jefferson--the cookies! Won't you think?--won't you try to be a little
+bit hungry?"
+
+Rebecca Mary knew what it was to be hungry and not be able to eat,
+but to be able to eat and not be hungry--this was away and beyond her
+experience. The sad puzzle of it she could not solve.
+
+One day the minister had a rather surprising summons to perform his
+priestly functions. The summoner was Rebecca Mary. She appeared like
+a sombre little shadow in his sunny sermon room. The minister's wife
+ushered her in, and in the brief instant of opening the door and
+announcing her name flashed him a warning glance. He had been acquainted
+so long with her glances that he was able to interpret this one with
+considerable accuracy. "All right," he glanced back. No, he would not
+smile--yes, he would remember that it was Rebecca Mary.
+
+"Do what she asks you," flashed the minister's wife's glance.
+
+"All right," flashed the minister. Then the door closed.
+
+"Thomas Jefferson is dying," Rebecca Mary began, hurriedly. "I came to
+see if you'd come."
+
+In spite of himself the minister gasped. Then, as the situation dawned
+clearly upon him, his mouth corners began--in spite of themselves--to
+curve upward. But in time he remembered the minister's wife, and drew
+them back to their centres of gravity. He waited a little. It was safer.
+
+"Aunt Olivia isn't at home and I'm glad. She doesn't care. Perhaps she
+would laugh. Oh, I know," appealed Rebecca Mary, piteously, "I know
+he's a rooster! It isn't because I don't know--but he's FOLKS to me! You
+needn't do anything but just smooth his feathers a little and say the
+Lord bless you. I thought perhaps you'd come and do that. _I_ could, but
+I wanted you to, because you're a minister. I thought--I thought perhaps
+you'd try and forget he's a rooster."
+
+"I will," the minister said, gently. Now his lips were quite grave. He
+took Rebecca Mary's hand and went with her.
+
+"He's a good man," murmured the minister's wife, watching them go. She
+had known he would go.
+
+"He was one of my parishioners," the minister was saying for the
+comforting of Rebecca Mary. Unconsciously he used the past tense, as
+one speaks of those close to death. It was well enough, for already big,
+gaunt, white Thomas Jefferson was in the past tense.
+
+Rebecca Mary chronicled the sad event in her diary:
+
+"Tomas Jefferson passed away at ten minutes of three this afternoon
+blessed are them that die in the Lord. The minnister did not get here in
+time. I wish I had asked him to run for he is a very good minnister and
+would have. He helped me berry him in the cold cold ground and we sang a
+him. I dident ask him to pray because he was only a rooster, but he
+was folks to me. I loved him. It is very lonesome. I dred wakening up
+tomorrow because he always crowed under my window. The Lord gaveth and
+the Lord has taken away."
+
+This last Rebecca Mary erased once, but she wrote it again after a
+moment's thought. For, she reasoned, it was the Lord part of Aunt Olivia
+which had given Thomas Jefferson to her. In the primitive little creed
+of Rebecca Mary every one had a Lord part, but some people's was very
+small. Not Aunt Olivia's--she had never gauged Aunt Olivia's Lord part;
+it would not have been consistent with her ideas of loyalty.
+
+It was very lonely, as Rebecca Mary had known it would be. At best
+her life had never been overfull of companionships, and the sudden
+taking-off--it seemed sudden, as all deaths do--of Thomas Jefferson was
+hard to bear. Strange how blank a space one great, white rooster can
+leave behind him!
+
+The yard and the orchard seemed full of blank spaces, though in a way
+Thomas Jefferson's soul seemed to frequent his old beloved haunts.
+Rebecca Mary could not see it pecking daintily about, but she felt it
+was there.
+
+"His soul isn't dead," she persisted, gently. She clung to the comfort
+of that. And one morning she thought she heard again Thomas Jefferson's
+old, cheery greeting to the sunrise. The sound she thought she heard
+woke her instantly. Was it Thomas Jefferson's soul crowing?
+
+"Aunt Olivia isent sorry," chronicled the diary, sadly. "Prehaps shes
+glad. Once she wished the Lord had forgot to create roosters. But she
+was ever kind to Tomas Jefferson, considdering the seeds he scrached up.
+That was his besittingest sin and I know he is sorry now. I wish Aunt
+Olivia was sorry."
+
+Nothing was ever said between the two about Rebecca Mary's loss, but
+Aunt Olivia recognized the keenness of it to the child. She worried
+a little about it; it reminded her of that other time of worry when
+Rebecca Mary and she had nearly starved. Sheets and roosters--there were
+so many worries in the world.
+
+That other time she went to the minister, this time to the minister's
+wife. One afternoon she went and carried her work.
+
+"You know about children," she began, without loss of time. "What
+happens when they lose their appetite over a dead rooster?"
+
+"Thomas Jefferson?" breathed the minister's wife, softly.
+
+"Yes--he's dead and buried, and she's mourning for him. I set three
+tarts on for dinner today, and I set three tarts AWAY after dinner.
+Rebecca Mary is fond of tarts. What should you do if it was Rhoda?"
+
+"Oh---Rhoda--why, I think I should get her another rooster, or a cat or
+something, to get her mind off. But Rhoda isn't Rebecca Mary--"
+
+Aunt Olivia folded up her work. She got up briskly.
+
+"They've got a white rooster down to the Trumbullses'," she said. "I
+guess I better go right down now; Tony Trumbull is liable to be at home
+just before supper. I'm very much obliged to you for your advice."
+
+"Did I advise her?" murmured the minister's wife, watching the resolute
+swing of Aunt Olivia's skirts as she strode away. "I was going to tell
+her that what would cure my Rhoda might not cure Rebecca Mary. Well, I
+hope it will work," but she was sure it wouldn't. She had grown a little
+acquainted with Rebecca Mary.
+
+It was the new, white rooster crowing, instead of the soul of Thomas
+Jefferson. Rebecca Mary found out after she had dressed and gone
+downstairs. Soon after that she appeared in the kitchen doorway with an
+armful of snowy feathers. Aunt Olivia, over her muffin pans, eyed her
+with secret delight. The cure was working sooner than she had dared to
+expect.
+
+"This is the Tony Trumbullses' rooster; if I hurry I guess I can carry
+him back before breakfast," Rebecca Mary said from the doorway. "I'll
+run, Aunt Olivia."
+
+"Carry him back!" Aunt Olivia's muffin spoon dropped into the bowl of
+creamy batter. One look at Rebecca Mary convinced her that the cure had
+not begun to work. Imperceptibly she stiffened. "He ain't anybody's but
+mine. I've bought him," she explained, briefly. "You set him down
+and feed him with these crumbs--he ain't human if he don't like
+cloth-o'-gold cake."
+
+But the child in the doorway, after gently releasing the great fellow,
+drew away quietly. The second look at her face convinced Aunt Olivia
+that the cure would never work.
+
+"You feed him, please, Aunt Olivia," Rebecca Mary said; "I--couldn't.
+I'll stir the muffins up."
+
+Nothing further was ever said about keeping the Tony Trumbull rooster.
+He pecked about the place in unrestrained freedom until the morning work
+was done, and then Aunt Olivia carried him home in her apron.
+
+"I concluded not to keep him--he'd likely be homesick," she said, with
+a qualm of conscience; for the big, white fellow had certainly shown no
+signs of homesickness. But she could not explain and reveal the secret
+places of Rebecca Mary's heart. Aunt Olivia, too, had her ideas of
+loyalty.
+
+In the diary there occurred brief mention of the episode: "The Tony
+Trumbull rooster has been here. I could eat him--that's how I feel about
+the Tony Trumbull rooster.
+
+"I never could have eatten Tomas Jefferson but once and then it would
+have broken my heart but I was starveing. Aunt Olivia took him back."
+
+Thomas Jefferson's grave was kept green. Rebecca Mary took her stents
+down into the orchard and sat beside it, sadly stitching. She kept it
+heaped with wild flowers and poppies from her own rows. Aunt Olivia's
+flowers she never touched. The bitterness of Aunt Olivia's not being
+sorry--perhaps being glad--rankled in her sore little soul. It would
+have helped--oh yes, it would have helped.
+
+Aunt Olivia worried on. It seemed to her that all Rebecca Mary's meals
+in one meal would not have kept a kitten alive--and that reminded her.
+She would try a kitten. The minister's wife had said a rooster or a cat.
+A white kitten, she decided, though she could scarcely have told why.
+
+The kitten was better, but it was not a cure. Rebecca Mary took the
+little creature to her breast and told it her grief for Thomas Jefferson
+and cried her Thomas Jefferson tears into its soft, white fur. In that
+way, at any rate, it was a success.
+
+"Maybe I shall love you some day," she whispered, "but I can't yet,
+while Thomas Jefferson is fresh. He's all I have room for. He was
+my intimate friend--when your intimate friend is dead you can't
+love anybody else right away." But she apologized to the little cat
+gently--she felt that an apology was due it.
+
+"You see how it is, little, white cat," she said. "I shall have to ask
+you to wait. But if I ever have a second love, I promise it will be
+you. You're a great DEAL comfortinger than that Tony Trumbull rooster! I
+could love you this minute if I had never loved Thomas Jefferson. Do you
+feel like waiting?"
+
+The little, white cat waited. And Aunt Olivia waited. She made tempting
+dishes for Rebecca Mary's meals, and put a ruffle into her nightgown
+neck and sleeves--Rebecca Mary had always yearned for ruffles.
+
+"I don't believe she sees 'em. She don't know they're there," groaned
+Aunt Olivia, impotently. "She don't see anything but Thomas Jefferson,
+and I don't know as she ever will!"
+
+But Rebecca Mary saw the ruffles and fluted them between her brown
+little fingers admiringly. She tried once or twice to go and thank Aunt
+Olivia, and got as far as her bedroom door. But the bitterness in her
+heart stayed her hand from turning the knob. If Aunt Olivia had only
+known that being sorry was the right thing to do! Strangely enough,
+though Rebecca Mary's view of the matter never occurred to Aunt Olivia,
+she came by and by to being sorry on her own account. Perhaps she had
+been all along, underneath her disquietude for Rebecca Mary's sorrow.
+Perhaps when she thought how quiet it had grown mornings, and what a
+good chance there was now for a supplementary nap, she was being sorry.
+When she remembered that she need not buy wheat now and yellow corn, and
+that the cookies would last longer--perhaps then she was sorry. But
+she did not know it. It seemed to come upon her with the nature of a
+surprise on one especial day. She had been working her un-"scrached,"
+untrampled flower-beds.
+
+"My grief!" she ejaculated, suddenly, as if just aware of it. "I declare
+I believe I miss him, too! I believe to my soul I'd like to hear him
+crow--I wouldn't mind if he came strutting in here!" And "in here" was
+Aunt Olivia's beloved garden of flowers. Surely she was being sorry now!
+
+It was the next day that Rebecca Mary's bitterness was sweetened--that
+she began to be cured. She and the little, white cat went down together
+to Thomas Jefferson's resting place. When they went home--and they went
+soon--Rebecca Mary got her diary and began to write in it with eager
+haste. Her sombre little face had lighted up with some inner gladness,
+like relief:
+
+"Shes been there and put some lavvender on and pinks. I mean Aunt
+Olivia. And shes the very fondest of her pinks and lavvender. So she
+must have loved Tomas Jefferson. Shes sorry. Shes sorry. Shes sorry. And
+Ime so glad."
+
+Rebecca Mary caught up the little, white cat and cried her first tear of
+joy on its neck. Then she wrote again:
+
+"Now there are two morners instead of one. Two morners seams so mutch
+lovinger than only one. I know he must feal better. I think he must have
+been hurt before and so was I. I wish I dass tell Aunt Olivia how glad I
+am shes sorry."
+
+But she told only the little, white cat. The Plummer mantle of reticence
+had fallen too heavily on her narrow little shoulders. What she longed
+to do she did not "dass." But that evening in her little ruffled
+nightgown she went to Aunt Olivia's room and thanked her for the
+ruffles.
+
+"They're beautiful," she murmured, in a small agony of shyness. "I think
+it was very kind of you to ruffle me--I've always wanted to be. Thank
+you very much." And then she had scurried away on her bare feet to the
+safe retreat of her own room under the eaves. Aunt Olivia, left behind,
+was unconsciously relieved at not having to respond. She was glad the
+child had discovered the ruffles and was pleased. It was a good sign.
+
+"I'll mix up some pancakes in the morning," Aunt Olivia said,
+complacently. "Pancakes may help along. Rebecca Mary is fond of 'em."
+
+The pinks and the fragrant lavender appeared to have established
+a certain unspoken comradeship between the two "morners" of Thomas
+Jefferson. Thereafter Rebecca Mary went about comforted, and Aunt Olivia
+relieved. The little, white cat purred about the skirts of one and the
+stubbed-out toes of the other in cheerful content.
+
+"Well?" the minister's wife queried, in a moment of social intercourse
+after church. She and Aunt Olivia walked down the aisle together.
+
+"She's getting over it--or beginning to," nodded Aunt Olivia. "That
+other rooster didn't work, but I think the little cat is going to. She
+hugs it."
+
+"Good! But she still mourns Thomas Jef--"
+
+"Of course!" Aunt Olivia interposed, rather crisply. "You couldn't
+expect her to get over it all in a minute. He was a remarkable rooster."
+
+"She misses him, herself," inwardly smiled the minister's little wife.
+Whether by virtue of her relationship to the minister or by her own
+virtue, she had learned to read human nature with a degree of accuracy.
+
+"I looked at myself in the glass tonight," confessed Rebecca Mary's
+diary, "but it was on acount of the rufles. I think Ime not quite so
+homebly in rufles. I think Aunt Olivia was kind to rufle me. I should
+like to ware this night gown in the day time. I wish folks did."
+
+The pencil slipped out of Rebecca Mary's fingers and rolled on the
+floor, to the undoing of the little, white cat, who had gone to bed in
+his basket. Rebecca Mary caught him up as he darted after the pencil,
+and hugged him in an odd little ecstasy. She felt oddly happy.
+
+"You little, white cat!" she cried, muffledly, her face in his thick
+coat, "you've waited and waited, but I think I'm going to love you
+now--you needn't wait any more."
+
+
+
+
+The Feel Doll
+
+
+
+The minister uttered a suppressed note of warning as solid little steps
+sounded in the hall. It was he who threw a hasty covering over the doll.
+The minister's wife sewed on undisturbedly. She did worse than that.
+
+"Come here, Rhoda," she called, "and tell me which you like better,
+three tucks or five in this petticoat?"
+
+"Five," promptly, upon inspection. Rhoda pulled away the concealing
+cover and regarded the stolid doll with tilted head. "She's 'nough like
+my Pharaoh's Daughter to be a blood relation," she remarked. "She's got
+the Pharaoh complexion."
+
+"Spoken like MY daughter!" laughed the minister. "But I thought new
+dolls in this house were always surprises. And here's Mrs. Minister
+making doll petticoats out in the open!"
+
+"This is Rebecca Mary's--I'm dressing a doll for Rebecca Mary, Robert.
+She's eleven years old and never had a doll! Rhoda's ten and has
+had--How many dolls have you had, Rhoda?"
+
+"Gracious! Why, Pharaoh's Daughter, an' Caiapha, an' Esther the
+Beautiful Queen, an' the Children of Israel--five o' them--an' Mrs. Job,
+an'--"
+
+"Never mind the rest, dear. You hear, Robert? Do you think Rhoda would
+be alive now if she'd never had a doll?"
+
+The minister pondered the question. "Maybe not, maybe not," he decided;
+"but possibly the dolls would have been."
+
+"Don't make me smile, Robert. I'm trying to make you cry. If Rebecca
+Mary were sixty instead of eleven I should dress her a doll."
+
+"Then why not one for Miss Olivia?"
+
+"I may dress her one," undauntedly, "if I find out she never had one in
+her life."
+
+"She never did." The minister's voice was positive. "And for that
+reason, dear, aren't you afraid she would not approve of Rebecca Mary's
+having one? Isn't it rather a delicate mat--"
+
+"Don't, Robert, don't discourage me. It's going to be such a beautiful
+doll! And you needn't tell me that poor little eleven-year-old
+woman-child won't hold out her empty arms for it. Robert, you're a
+minister; would it be wrong to give it to her STRAIGHT?"
+
+"Straight, dear?"
+
+"Yes; without saying anything to her aunt Olivia. Tell me. Rhoda's gone.
+Say it as--as liberally as you can."
+
+The minister for answer swept doll, petticoat, and minister's wife into
+his arms, and kissed them all impartially.
+
+"Think if it were Rhoda," she pleaded.
+
+"And you were 'Aunt Olivia'? You ask me to think such hard things, dear!
+If I could stop being a minister long enough--"
+
+"Stop?" she laughed; but she knew she meant keep on. With a sigh she
+burrowed a little deeper in his neck. "Then I'll ask Aunt Olivia first,"
+she said.
+
+She went back to her tucking. Only once more did she mention Rebecca
+Mary. The once was after she had come downstairs from tucking the
+children into bed. She stood in the doorway with the look in her face
+that mothers have after doing things like that. The minister loved that
+look.
+
+"Robert, nights when I kiss the children--you knew when you married me
+that I was foolish--I kiss little lone Rebecca Mary, too. I began the
+day Thomas Jefferson died--I went to the Rebecca-Mary-est window and
+threw her a kiss. I went tonight. Don't say a word; you knew when you
+married me."
+
+Aunt Olivia received the resplendent doll in silence. Plummer honesty
+and Plummer politeness were at variance. Plummer politeness said: "Thank
+her. For goodness' sake, aren't you going to thank the minister's wife?"
+But Plummer honesty, grim and yieldless, said, "You can't thank her,
+because you're not thankful." So Aunt Olivia sat silent, with her
+resplendent doll across her knees.
+
+"For Rebecca Mary," the minister's wife was saying, in rather a halting
+way. "I dressed it for her. I thought perhaps she never--"
+
+"She never," said Aunt Olivia, briefly. Strange that at that particular
+instant she should remember a trifling incident in the child's far-off
+childhood. The incident had to do with a little, white nightgown rolled
+tightly and pinned together. She had found Rebecca Mary in her little
+waist and petticoat cuddling it in bed.
+
+"It's a dollie. Please 'sh, Aunt Olivia, or you'll wake her up!" the
+child had whispered, in an agony. "Oh, you're not agoing to turn her
+back to a nightgown? Don't unpin her, Aunt Olivia--it will kill her!
+I'll name her after you if you'll let her stay."
+
+"Get up and take your clothes off." Strange Aunt Olivia should remember
+at this particular instant; should remember, too, that the pin had
+been a little rusty and came out hard. Rebecca Mary had slid out of bed
+obediently, but there had been a look on her little brown face as of one
+bereaved. She had watched the pin come out, and the nightgown unroll, in
+stricken silence. When it hung released and limp over Aunt Olivia's arm
+she had given one little cry:
+
+"She's dead!"
+
+The minister's wife was talking hurriedly. Her voice seemed a good
+way off; it had the effect of coming nearer and growing louder as Aunt
+Olivia stepped back across the years.
+
+"Of course you are to do as you think best about giving it to her," the
+minister's wife said, unwillingly. This came of being a minister's wife!
+"But I think--I have always thought--that little girls ought--I
+mean Rhoda ought--to have dolls to cuddle. It seems part of
+their--her--inheritance." This was hard work! If Miss Olivia would not
+sit there looking like that--.
+
+"As if I'd done something unkind!" thought the gentle little mother,
+indignantly. She got up presently and went away. But Aunt Olivia, with
+the doll hanging unhealthily over her arm, followed her to the door.
+There was something the Plummer honesty insisted upon Aunt Olivia's
+saying. She said it reluctantly:
+
+"I think I ought to tell you that I've never believed in dolls. I've
+always thought they were a waste of time and kept children from learning
+to do useful things. I've brought Rebecca Mary up according to my best
+light."
+
+"Worst darkness!" thought the minister's wife, hotly.
+
+"She's never had a doll. I never had one. I got along. I could make
+butter when I was seven. So perhaps you'd better take the doll--"
+
+"No, no! Please keep it, Miss Olivia, and if you should ever change your
+mind--I mean perhaps sometime--good-bye. It's a beautiful day, isn't
+it?"
+
+Aunt Olivia took it up into the guest chamber and laid it in an empty
+bureau drawer. She closed the drawer hastily. She did not feel as
+duty-proof as she had once felt, before things had happened--softening
+things that had pulled at her heartstrings and weakened her. The quilt
+on the guest chamber bed was one of the things; she would not look at it
+now. And the sheets under the quilt--and the grave of Thomas Jefferson
+that she could see from the guest chamber window. Aunt Olivia was
+terribly beset with the temptation to take the doll out to Rebecca Mary
+in the garden.
+
+"Are you going to do it?" demanded Duty, confronting her. "Are you
+going to give up all your convictions now? Rebecca Mary's in her twelfth
+year-pretty late to begin to humor her. I thought you didn't believe in
+humoring."
+
+"I unpinned the nightgown," parried Aunt Olivia, on the defensive. "I
+never let her make another one."
+
+"But you're weakening now. You want to let her have THIS doll."
+
+"It seems like part of--of her inheritance."
+
+"Lock that drawer!"
+
+Aunt Olivia turned the key unhappily. It was not that her "convictions"
+had changed--it was her heart.
+
+She went up at odd times and looked at the doll the minister's wife had
+dressed. She had an unaccountable, uncomfortable feeling that it was
+lying there in its coffin--that Rebecca Mary would have said, "She's
+dead."
+
+It was a handsome doll. Aunt Olivia was not acquainted with dolls,
+but she acknowledged that. She admired it unwillingly. She liked its
+clothes--the minister's wife had not spared any pains. She had not
+stinted in tucks nor ruffles.
+
+Once Aunt Olivia took it out and turned it over in her hands with
+critical intent, but there was nothing to criticise. It was a beautiful
+doll. She held it with a curious, shy tenderness. But that time she did
+not sit down with it. It was the next time.
+
+The rocker was so near the bureau, and Aunt Olivia was tired--and the
+doll was already in her arms. She only sat down. For a minute she sat
+quite straight and unrelaxed, then she settled back a little--a little
+more. The doll lay heavily against her, its flaxen head touching her
+breast. After the manner of high-bred dolls, its eyes drooped sleepily.
+
+Aunt Olivia began to rock--a gentle sway back and forth. She was sixty,
+but this was the first time she had ever rocked a chi--a doll. So she
+rocked for a little, scarcely knowing it. When she found out, a wave of
+soft pink dyed her face and flowed upward redly to her hair.
+
+"Well!" Duty jibed, mocking her.
+
+"Don't say a word!" cried poor Aunt Olivia. "I'll put her right back."
+
+"What good will that do?"
+
+"I'll lock her in."
+
+"You've locked her in before."
+
+"I'll--I'll hide the key."
+
+"Where you can find it! Think again."
+
+Aunt Olivia thrust the doll back into its coffin with unsteady hands.
+The red in her face had faded to a faint, abiding pink. She locked the
+drawer and drew out the key. She strode to the window and flung it out
+with a wide sweep of her arm.
+
+The minister's wife, ignorant of the results of her kind little
+experiment, resolved to question Rebecca Mary the next time she came on
+an errand. She would do it with extreme caution.
+
+"I'll just feel round," she said. "I want to know if her aunt's given it
+to her. You think she must have, don't you, Robert? By this time? Why,
+it was six weeks ago I carried it over! It was such a nice, friendly
+little doll! By this time they would be such friends--if her aunt gave
+it to her. Robert, you think--"
+
+"I think it's going to rain," the minister said. But he kissed her to
+make it easier.
+
+Rebecca Mary came over to bring Aunt Olivia's rule for parson-cake that
+the minister's wife had asked for.
+
+"Come in, Rebecca Mary," the minister's wife said, cordially. "Don't you
+want to see the new dress Rhoda's doll is going to have? I suppose you
+could make your doll's dress yourself?" It seemed a hard thing to say.
+Feeling round was not pleasant.
+
+"P'haps I could, but she doesn't wear dresses," Rebecca Mary answered,
+gravely.
+
+"No?" This was puzzling. "Her clothes don't come off, I suppose?" Then
+it could not be the nice, friendly doll.
+
+"No'm. Nor they don't go on, either. She isn't a feel doll."
+
+"A--what kind did you say, dear?" The minister's wife paused in her work
+interestedly. Distinctly, Miss Olivia had not given her THE doll; but
+this doll--"I don't think I quite understood, Rebecca Mary."
+
+"No'm; it's a little hard. She isn't a FEEL doll, I said. I never had a
+feel one. Mine hasn't any body, just a soul. But she's a great comfort."
+
+"Robert," appealed the minister's wife, helplessly. This was a case for
+the minister--a case of souls.
+
+"Tell us some more about her, Rebecca Mary," the minister urged, gently.
+But there was helplessness, too, in his eyes.
+
+"Why, that's all!" returned Rebecca Mary, in surprise. "Of course I
+can't dress her or undress her or take her out calling. But it's a great
+comfort to rock her soul to sleep."
+
+"Call Rhoda," murmured the wife to the minister; but Rhoda was already
+there. She volunteered prompt explanation. There was no hesitation in
+Rhoda's face.
+
+"She means a make believe doll. Don't you, Rebecca Mary?"
+
+"Yes," Rebecca Mary assented; "that's her other name, I suppose, but I
+never called her by it."
+
+"What did you call her?" demanded practical Rhoda. "What's her name
+mean?"
+
+"Rhoda!"--hastily, from the minister's wife. This seemed like sacrilege.
+But Rhoda's clear, blue eyes were fixed upon Rebecca Mary; she had not
+heard her mother's warning little word.
+
+A shy color spread thinly over the lean little face of Rebecca Mary. For
+the space of a breath or two she hesitated.
+
+"Her name's--Felicia," then, softly.
+
+"Robert"--the children had gone out together; the minister's wife's eyes
+were unashamedly wet--"Robert, I wish you were a--a sheriff instead of
+a minister. Because I think I would make a better sheriff's wife. Do you
+know what I would make you do?"
+
+The minister could guess.
+
+"I'd make you ARREST that woman, Robert!"
+
+"Felicia!" But she saw willingness to be a sheriff come into his own
+eyes and stop there briefly.
+
+"Don't call me 'Felicia' while I feel as wicked as this! Oh, Robert, to
+think she named her little soul-doll after me!"
+
+"It's a beautiful name."
+
+Suddenly the wickedness was over. She laughed unsteadily.
+
+"It wouldn't be a good name for a sheriff's wife, would it?" she said.
+"So I'll stay by my own minister."
+
+One day close upon this time Aunt Olivia came abruptly upon Rebecca Mary
+in the grape arbor. She was sitting in her little rocking chair, swaying
+back and forth slowly. She did not see Aunt Olivia. What was she was
+crooning half under her breath?
+
+  "Oh, hush, oh, hush, my dollie;
+  Don't worry any more,
+  For Rebecca Mary 'n' the angels
+  Are watching o'er,
+  ---O'er 'n' o'er 'n' o'er."
+
+The same words over and over--growing perhaps a little softer and
+tenderer. Rebecca Mary's arm was crooked as though a little flaxen head
+lay in the bend of it. Rebecca Mary's brooding little face was gazing
+downward intently at her empty arm. Quite suddenly it came upon Aunt
+Olivia that she had seen the child rocking like this before--that she
+must have seen her often.
+
+  "Rebecca Mary 'n' the angels
+  Are watching o'er,"
+
+sang on the crooning little voice in Aunt Olivia's ears.
+
+The doll in its coffin upstairs; down here Rebecca Mary rocking her
+empty arms. The two thoughts flashed into Aunt Olivia's mind and welded
+into one. All her vacillations and Duty's sharp reminders occurred
+to her clearly. She had thought that at last she was proof against
+temptation, but she had not thought of this. She was not prepared for
+Rebecca Mary, here in her little rocking chair, rocking her little
+soul-doll to sleep.
+
+The angels were used to watching o'er, but Aunt Olivia could not bear
+it. She went away with a strange, unaccustomed ache in her throat. The
+minister's wife would not have wanted her arrested then.
+
+Aunt Olivia tiptoed away as though Rebecca Mary had said, "'Sh!" She was
+remembering, as she went, the brief, sweet moment when she had sat like
+that and rocked, with the doll the minister's wife dressed, in her arms.
+It seemed to establish a new link of kinship between her and Rebecca
+Mary.
+
+She ran plump into Duty.
+
+"Oh!" she gasped. She was a little stunned. Aunt Olivia's Duty was
+solid.
+
+"I know where you've been. I tried get there in time."
+
+"You're too late," Aunt Olivia said, firmly, "Don't stop me; there's
+something I must do before it gets too dark. It's six o'clock now."
+
+"Wait!" commanded Duty. "Are you crazy? You don't mean--"
+
+"Go back there and look at that child--and hear what she's singing! Stay
+long enough to take it all in--don't hurry."
+
+But Duty barred her way, grim and stern.
+
+Palely she put up both her hands and thrust it aside. She did not once
+look back at it.
+
+Already it was dusky under the guest chamber window. She had to stoop
+and peer and feel in the long tangle of grass. She kept on patiently
+with the Plummer kind of patience that never gave up. She was eager and
+smiling, as though something pleasant were at the end of the peering and
+stooping and feeling.
+
+Aunt Olivia was hunting for a key.
+
+
+
+
+The Plummer Kind
+
+
+
+The doll's name was Olivicia.
+
+Rebecca Mary had evolved the name from her inner consciousness and her
+intense gratitude to Aunt Olivia and the minister's wife. She had put
+Aunt Olivia first with instinctive loyalty, though in the secret little
+closet of her soul she had longed to call the beautiful being Felicia,
+intact and sweet. She did not know the meaning of Felicia, but she knew
+that the doll, as it lay in the loving cradle of her arms, gazing upward
+with changeless placidity and graciousness, looked as one should look
+whose name was Felicia. Greater compliment than this Rebecca Mary could
+not have paid the minister's wife.
+
+"Olivicia," she had placed the being on the sill of the attic window,
+stood confronting, addressing it: "Olivicia, it's coming--it is very
+near to! Sit there and listen and smile--oh yes, smile, SMILE. I don't
+wonder! I would too, only I'm too glad. When you're TOO glad you can't
+smile. I've been waiting for it to come. Olivicia, seems as if I'd been
+waiting a thousan' years. You're so young, you've only lived such little
+while, of course I don't expect you understand the deep-downness inside
+o' me when I think--"
+
+The address fluttered and came to a standstill here. Rebecca Mary was
+suddenly minded that Olivicia was in the dark; must be enlightened
+before she could smile understandingly.
+
+"Why, you poor dear!--why, you don't know what it is that's coming and
+that's near to! It's the--city, Olivicia," enlightened Rebecca Mary,
+gently, to insure against shock. "Aunt Olivia's going--to--the--city."
+
+In Rebecca Mary's dreamings it had always been THE city. It did not need
+local habitation and a name; enough that it had streets upon streets,
+houses upon houses upon houses, a dazzling swirl of men, women, and
+little children--noise, glitter, glory. In her dreamings the city was
+something so wondrous and grand that Heaven might have been its name.
+The streets upon streets were not paved with gold, of course--of course
+she knew they were not paved with gold! But in spite of herself she knew
+that she would be disappointed if they did not shine.
+
+Aunt Olivia had said it that morning. At breakfast--quite
+matter-of-factly. Think of saying it matter-of-factly!
+
+"I'm going to the city soon, Rebecca Mary," she had said, between sips
+of her tea. "Perhaps by Friday week, but I haven't set the day, really.
+There's a good deal to do."
+
+Rebecca Mary had been helping do it all day. Now it was nearly time for
+the pageant of red and gold in the west that Rebecca Mary loved, and she
+had come up here with the beautiful being to watch it through the tiny
+panes of the attic window, but more to ease the aching rapture in her
+soul by speech. She must say it out loud. The city--the city--to the
+city of streets and houses and men and wonders upon wonders!
+
+Olivicia had come in the capacity of calm listener; for nothing excited
+Olivicia.
+
+"I," Aunt Olivia had said, but Aunt Olivia usually said "I." There was
+no discouragement in that to Rebecca Mary. It did not for a moment occur
+to her that "I" did not mean "we."
+
+The valise they had got down from its cobwebby niche was roomy; it would
+hold enough for two. Rebecca Mary knew that, because she had packed it
+so many times in her dreamings. She wished Aunt Olivia would let her
+pack it now. She knew just where she would put everything--her
+best dress and Aunt Olivia's (for of course they would wear their
+second-bests), their best hats and shoes and gloves. Their nightgowns
+she would roll tightly and put in one end, for it doesn't hurt
+nightgowns to be rolled tightly. Of course she would not put
+anything heavy, like hair brushes and shoes and things, on top of
+anything--unless it was the nightgowns, for it doesn't hurt--
+
+"Oh, Olivicia--oh, Olivicia, how I hope she'll say, 'Rebecca Mary, you
+may pack the valise'! I could do it with my eyes shut, I've done it so
+many, many times!"
+
+But Aunt Olivia did not say it. One day and then another went by without
+her saying it, and then one morning Rebecca Mary knew by the plump,
+well-fed aspect of the valise that it was packed. Aunt Olivia had packed
+it in the night.
+
+There was no one else in the room when Rebecca Mary made her
+disappointing little discovery. She went over to the plump valise and
+prodded it gently with her finger. But it is so difficult to tell in
+that way whether your own best dress, your own best hat, best shoes,
+best gloves, are in there. Rebecca Mary hurried upstairs and looked in
+her closet and in her "best" bureau drawer.
+
+They were not there! In her relief she caught up the beautiful being and
+strained her hard, lifeless little body to her own warm breast. If she
+had not been Rebecca Mary, she would have danced about the room.
+
+"Oh, I'm so relieved, Olivicia!" she laughed, softly. "If they're not up
+here, THEY'RE DOWN THERE. They've got to be somewhere. They're in that
+valise--valise--vali-i-ise!"
+
+Rebecca Mary had never been to a city, and within her remembrance Aunt
+Olivia had never been. Curiosity was not a Plummer trait, hence Rebecca
+Mary had never asked many questions about the remote period before her
+own advent into Aunt Olivia's life. The same Plummer restraint kept her
+now from asking questions. There was nothing to do but wait, but the
+waiting was illumined by her joyous anticipations.
+
+Oddly enough, Aunt Olivia seemed to have no anticipations--at least
+joyous ones. Her, thin, grave face may even have looked a little thinner
+and graver, IF Rebecca Mary had thought to notice.
+
+The night the lean old valise took on plumpness, Aunt Olivia went often
+into Mary's little room. Many of the times she came out very shortly
+with the child's "best" things trailing from her arms, but once or twice
+she stayed rather long--long enough to stand beside a little white bed
+and look down on a flushed little face. A pair of wide-open eyes watched
+her smilingly from the pillows, but they were not Rebecca Mary's eyes,
+and Olivicia was altogether trustworthy.
+
+An odd thing happened--but Olivicia never told. Why should she publish
+abroad that she had lain there and seen Aunt Olivia bend once--bend
+twice--over Rebecca Mary and kiss her?
+
+Softly, patiently, very wearily, Aunt Olivia went in and out. The things
+she brought out in her arms she folded carefully and packed, but not
+in the lank old valise. She put them all with tender painstaking into a
+quaint little carpetbag. When the work was done she set the bag away out
+of sight, and went about packing her own things in the old valise.
+
+The day before, she had been to see the minister and the minister's
+wife. She called for them both, and sat down gravely and made her
+proposition. It was startling only because of the few words it took
+to make it. Otherwise it was very pleasant, and the minister and the
+minister's wife received it with nods and smiles.
+
+"Of course, Miss Olivia--why, certainly!" smiled and nodded the
+minister.
+
+"Why, it will be delightful--and Rhoda will be so pleased!" nodded and
+smiled the minister's wife. But after their caller had gone she faced
+the minister with indignant eyes.
+
+"Why did you let her?" she demanded. "Why did you spoil it all by that?"
+
+"Because she was Miss Olivia," he answered, gently.
+
+"Yes--yes, I suppose so," reluctantly; "but, anyway, you needn't have
+let her do it in advance. Actually it made me blush, Robert!"
+
+The minister rubbed his cheeks tentatively. "Made me, too," he admitted,
+"but I respect Miss Olivia so much--"
+
+The minister's wife tacked abruptly to her other source of indignation.
+
+"Why doesn't she TAKE Rebecca Mary? Robert, wait! You know it isn't
+because--You know better!"
+
+"It isn't because, dear--I know better," he hurried, assuringly. The
+minister was used to her little indignations and loved them for being
+hers. They were harmless, too, and wont to have a good excuse for being.
+This one, now--the minister in his heart wondered that Miss Olivia did
+not take Rebecca Mary.
+
+"It would be such a treat. Robert, you think what a treat it would be to
+Rebecca Mary!"
+
+"Still, dear--"
+
+"I don't want to be still! I want Rebecca Mary to have that treat!" But
+she kissed him in token of being willing to drop it there--it was her
+usual token--and ran away to get a little room ready. There was not a
+device known to the minister's wife that she did not use to make that
+room pleasant.
+
+"Shall I take your pincushion, Rhoda?" Rhoda had come up to help.
+
+"Yes," eagerly, "and I'll write Welcome with the pins."
+
+"And the little fan to put on the wall--the pink one?"
+
+"Yes, yes; let me spread it out, mamma!"
+
+"That's grand. Now if we only had a pink quilt--"
+
+"I 'only have' one!" laughed Rhoda, hurrying after it.
+
+The whole little room when they left, like the pins in the pincushion,
+spelled "WELCOME."
+
+Aunt Olivia got up earlier than usual one day and went about the house
+for a survey. The valise and the little carpetbag she carried downstairs
+and out on to the front steps. Her face was whitened as if by a long
+night's vigil. When she called Rebecca Mary it was with a voice strained
+hoarse. The beautiful being Olivicia watched her with intent, unwinking
+gaze. Could it be Olivicia understood?
+
+"Hurry and dress, Rebecca Mary; there's a good deal to do," Aunt Olivia
+said at the door. She did not go in. "Yes, in your second-best--don't
+you see I've put it out. You can wear that every day now, till--for a
+while." Something in the voice startled Rebecca Mary out of her subdued
+ecstasy and sent her down to breakfast with a nameless fear tugging at
+her heart.
+
+"You're going to stay at the minister's--I've paid your board in
+advance," Aunt Olivia said, monotonously, as if it were her lesson. She
+did not look at Rebecca Mary. "I've put in your long-sleeve aprons so
+you can help do up the dishes. There's plenty of handkerchiefs to last.
+You mustn't forget your rubbers when it's wet, or to make up your bed
+yourself. I don't want you to make the minister's wife any more trouble
+than you can help."
+
+The lesson went monotonously on, but Rebecca Mary scarcely heard. She
+had heard the first sentence--her sentence, poor child! "You're going to
+stay at the minister's--stay at the minister's--stay at the minister's."
+It said itself over and over again in her ears. In her need for somebody
+to lean on, her startled gaze sought the beautiful being across the room
+in agonized appeal.
+
+But Olivicia was staring smilingly at Aunt Olivia. ET TU, OLIVICIA!
+
+If Rebecca Mary had noticed, there was an appealing, wistful look in
+Aunt Olivia's eyes too, in odd contrast to the firm lips that moved
+steadily on with their lesson:
+
+"You can walk to school with Rhoda, you'll enjoy that. You've never had
+folks to walk with. And you can stay with her, only you mustn't forget
+your stents. I've put in some towels to hem. Maybe the minister's wife
+has got something; if so, hem hers first. You'll be like one o' the
+family, and they're nice folks, but I want you to keep right on being a
+Plummer."
+
+Years afterwards Rebecca Mary remembered the dizzy dance of the bottles
+in the caster--they seemed to join hands and sway and swing about their
+silver circlet and how Aunt Olivia's buttons marched and countermarched
+up and down Aunt Olivia's alpaca dress. She did not look above the
+buttons--she did not dare to. If she was to keep right on being a
+Plummer, she must not cry.
+
+"That's all," she heard through the daze and dizziness, "except that
+I can't tell when I'll be back. It--ain't decided. Likely I shan't be
+able--there won't be much chance to write, and you needn't expect me to.
+No need to write me either. That's all, I guess."
+
+The stage that came for Aunt Olivia dropped the little carpetbag and
+Rebecca Mary at the minister's. In the brief interval between the start
+and the dropping, Rebecca Mary sat, stiff and numb, on the edge of the
+high seat and gazed out unfamiliarly at the familiar landmarks they
+lurched past. At any other time the knowledge that she was going to the
+minister's to stay--to live--would have filled her with staid joy. At
+any other time--but THIS time only a dull ache filled her little dreary
+world. Everything seemed to ache--the munching cows in the Trumbull
+pasture, the cats on the doorsteps, the dog loping along beside the
+stage, the stage driver's stooping old back. Aunt Olivia was going to
+the city--Rebecca Mary wasn't going to the city. There was no room in
+the world for anything but that and the ache.
+
+Rebecca Mary's indignation was not born till night. Then, lying in the
+dainty bed under Rhoda's pink quilt, her mood changed. Until then she
+had only been disappointed. But then she sat up suddenly and said bitter
+things about Aunt Olivia.
+
+"She's gone to have a good time all to herself--and she might have taken
+me. She didn't, she didn't, and she might've. She wanted all the good
+time herself! She didn't want me to have any!"
+
+"Rebecca Mary!--did you speak, dear?" It was the gentle voice of the
+minister's wife outside the door. Rebecca Mary's red little hands
+unwrung and dropped on the pink quilt.
+
+"No'm, I did--I mean yes'm, I didn't--I mean--"
+
+"You don't feel sick? There isn't anything the matter, dear?"
+
+"No'm--oh, yes'm, yes'm!" for there was something the matter. It was
+Aunt Olivia. But she must not say it--must not cry--must keep right on
+being a Plummer.
+
+"Robert, I didn't go in--I couldn't," the minister's wife said, back
+in the cheery sitting room. "I suppose you think I'd have gone in and
+comforted her, taken her right in my arms and comforted her the Rhoda
+way, but I didn't."
+
+"No?" The minister's voice was a little vague on account of the sermon
+on his knees.
+
+"I seemed to know--something told me right through that door--that she'd
+rather I wouldn't. Robert, if the child is homesick, it's a different
+kind of homesickness."
+
+"The Plummer kind," he suggested. The minister was coming to.
+
+"Yes, the Plummer kind, I suppose, Plummers are such--such PLUMMERY
+persons, Robert!"
+
+Upstairs under the pink quilt the rigid little figure relaxed just
+enough to admit of getting out of bed and fumbling in the little
+carpetbag. With her diary in her hand--for Aunt Olivia had remembered
+her diary--Rebecca Mary went to the window and sat down. She had to
+hold the cookbook up at a painful angle and peer at it sharply, for the
+moonlight that filtered into the little room through the vines was dim
+and soft.
+
+"Aunt Olivia has gone to the city and I haven't," painfully traced
+Rebecca Mary. "She wanted the good time all to herself. I shall never
+forgive Aunt Olivia the Lord have mercy on her." Then Rebecca Mary
+went back to bed. She dreamed that the cars ran off the track and they
+brought Aunt Olivia's pieces home to her. In the dreadful dream she
+forgave Aunt Olivia.
+
+It was very pleasant at the minister's and the minister's wife's.
+Rebecca Mary felt the warmth and pleasantness of it in every fibre of
+her body and soul. But she was not happy nor warm. She thought it was
+indignation against Aunt Olivia--she did not know she was homesick. She
+did not know why she went to the old home every day after school and
+wandered through Aunt Olivia's flower garden, and sat with little brown
+chin palm-deep on the doorsteps. Gradually the indignation melted out of
+existence and only the homesickness was left. It sat on her small, lean
+face like a little spectre. It troubled the minister's wife.
+
+"What can we do, Robert?" she asked.
+
+"What?" he echoed; for the minister, too, was troubled.
+
+"She wanders about like a little lost soul. When she plays with the
+children it's only the outside of her that plays."
+
+"Only the outside," he nodded.
+
+"Last night I went in, Robert, and--and tried the Rhoda way. I think
+she liked it, but it didn't comfort her. I am sure now that it is
+homesickness, Robert." They were both sure, but the grim little spectre
+sat on, undaunted by all their kindnesses.
+
+"When thy father and thy mother forsake the," wrote Rebecca Mary in the
+cookbook diary, "and thy Aunt Olivia for I know it means and thy Aunt
+Olivia then the Lord will take the up, but I dont feal as if anyboddy
+had taken me up. The ministers wife did once but of course she had to
+put me down again rite away. She is a beutiful person and I love her but
+she is differunt from thy father and thy mother and thy Aunt Olivia. Ide
+rather have Aunt Olivia take me up than to have the Lord."
+
+It was when she shut the battered little book this time that Rebecca
+Mary remembered one or two things that had happened the morning Aunt
+Olivia went away. It was queer how she HADN'T remembered them before.
+
+She remembered that Aunt Olivia had taken her sharp little face between
+her own hands and looked down wistfully at it--wistfully, Rebecca Mary
+remembered now, though she did not call it by that name. She remembered
+Aunt Olivia had said, "You needn't hem anything unless it's for the
+minister's wife--never mind the towels I put in." That was almost the
+last thing she had said. She had put her head out of the stage door to
+say it. Rebecca Mary had hemmed a towel each day. There were but two
+left, and she resolved to hem both of those tomorrow. A sudden little
+longing was born within her for more towels to hem for Aunt Olivia.
+
+It was nearly three weeks after Rebecca Mary's entrance into the
+minister's family when the letter came. It was directed to Rebecca Mary,
+and lay on her plate when she came home from school.
+
+"Oh, look, you've got a letter, Rebecca Mary!" heralded Rhoda, joyfully.
+Then her face fell, for maybe the letter would say Aunt Olivia was
+coming home.
+
+"Is it from your aunt Olivia?" she asked, anxiously.
+
+"No," Rebecca Mary said, in slow surprise. "The writing isn't, anyway,
+and the name is another one--"
+
+"Oh! Oh! Maybe she's got mar--"
+
+"Rhoda!" cautioned the minister.
+
+This is the letter Rebecca Mary read:
+
+"Dear Rebecca Mary,--You see I know your name from your aunt. She talked
+about you all the time, but I am writing you of my own accord. She does
+not know it. I think you will like to know that at last we are feeling
+very hopeful about your aunt. We have been very anxious since the
+operation, she had so little strength to rally with. But now if she
+keeps on as well as this you will have her home again in a little while.
+The doctors say three weeks. She is the patientest patient in the ward.
+Yours very truly, Sara Ellen Nesbitt, Nurse" Ward A, Emmons Hospital
+
+That was the letter. Rebecca Mary's face grew a little whiter at every
+line of it. At every line understanding grew clearer, till at the end
+she knew it all. She gave a little cry, and ran out of the room. Love
+and remorse and sympathy fought for first place in her laboring little
+breast. In the next few minutes she lived so long a time and thought so
+many thoughts! But above everything else towered joy that Aunt Olivia
+was coming home.
+
+Rebecca Mary's eyes blazed with pride at being a Plummer. This kind of
+courage was the Plummer kind. The child's lank little figure seemed to
+grow taller and straighter. She held up her head splendidly and exulted.
+She felt like going up on the minister's housetop and proclaiming:
+"She's my aunt Olivia! She's mine! She's mine--I'm a Plummer, too! All
+o' you listen, she's my aunt Olivia, and she's coming home!"
+
+Suddenly the child flung out her arms towards the south where Aunt
+Olivia was. And though she stood quite still, something within her
+seemed to spring away and go hurrying through the clear air.
+
+"I shouldn't suppose Aunt Olivia would ever forgive me, but she's Aunt
+Olivia and she will," wrote Rebecca Mary that night, her small, dark
+face full of a solemn peace--it seemed so long since she had been full
+of peace before. She wrote on eagerly:
+
+"When she gets home Ime going to hug her I can't help it if it wont be
+keeping right on."
+
+
+
+
+Article Seven
+
+
+
+Rebecca Mary measured them. Against the woodshed wall, with chalk--it
+was not altogether an easy thing to do. The result startled her. With
+rather unsteady little fingers she measured from chalk mark to floor
+again, to make sure it was as bad as that. It was even a little worse.
+
+"Oh," sighed Rebecca Mary, "to think they belong to me--to think they're
+hitched on!" She gazed down at them with scorn and was ashamed of them.
+She tried to conceal their length with her brief skirts; but when she
+straightened up, there they were again, as long as ever. She sat down
+suddenly on the shed floor and drew them up underneath her. That was
+temporarily a relief. "If I sit here world without end nobody'll see
+'em," grimly smiled Rebecca Mary.
+
+It was her legs Rebecca Mary measured against the woodshed wall. It was
+her legs she was ashamed of. No wonder the minister's wife had said
+to the minister going home from meeting, with Rebecca Mary behind them
+unawares,--no wonder she had said, "Robert, HAVE you noticed Rebecca
+Mary's legs?"
+
+Rebecca Mary had not heard the reply of the minister, for of course she
+had gone away then. If she had stayed she would have heard him say, with
+exaggerated prudery, "Felicia! My dear! Were you alluding to Rebecca
+Mary's limbs?" for the minister wickedly remembered inadvertent
+occasions when he himself had called legs legs.
+
+"LEGS," the minister's wife repeated, calmly--"Rebecca Mary's are too
+long for limbs. Robert, that child will grow up one of these days!"
+
+"They all do," sighed the minister. "It's human nature, dear. You'll be
+telling me next that there's something the matter with Rhoda's--legs."
+
+The minister's wife gazed thoughtfully ahead at a little trio fast
+approaching the vanishing point. Her eyes grew a little wistful.
+
+"There is now, perhaps, but I haven't noticed--I won't look!" she
+murmured. "And, anyway, Robert, Rhoda will give us a little time to get
+used to it in. But Rebecca Mary isn't the Rhoda kind--I don't believe
+Rebecca Mary will give us even three days of grace!"
+
+"I always supposed Rebecca Mary was born that way--grown up," the
+minister remarked, tucking a gloved hand comfortably close under his
+arm. "I wouldn't let it worry me, dear."
+
+"Oh, I don't--not worry, really," she said, smiling--"only her legs
+startled me a little today. If she were mine, I should let her dresses
+down."
+
+"If she were Rhod--"
+
+"She isn't, she's Rebecca Mary. Probably if I were Miss Olivia I would
+let Rhoda's down!" And she knew she would.
+
+Rebecca Mary on the woodshed floor sat and thought "deep-down" thoughts.
+Her eyes were fixed dreamily on a big knothole before her, and the
+thoughts seemed to come out of it and stand before her, demanding
+imperiously to be thought. One after another--a relentless procession.
+
+"Think me," the first one had commanded. "I'm the Thought of Growing
+Up. I saw you measuring your legs, and I concluded it was time for me to
+introduce myself. I had to come some time, didn't I?"
+
+"Oh yes," breathed Rebecca Mary, sadly. "I don't suppose I could expect
+you to stay in there always; but--but I'm not very glad to see you. You
+needn't have come so SUDDEN," she added, with gentle resentment.
+
+The Thought of Growing Up crept into her mind and nestled down there. As
+thoughts go, it was not an unkind one.
+
+"You'll get used to me sometime and like me," it said, comfortingly. But
+Rebecca Mary knew better. She drove it out.
+
+Why must legs keep on growing and unwelcome Thoughts come out of
+knotholes? Why could not little girls keep on sewing stents and learning
+arithmetic and carrying beautiful doll-beings to bed? Why had the Lord
+created little girls like this--this growing kind?
+
+"If I had made the world," began Rebecca Mary--but stopped in a hurry.
+The irreverence of presuming to make a better world than the Lord shamed
+her.
+
+"I suppose He knew best, but if He'd ever been a little girl--" This was
+worse than the other. Rebecca Mary hastily dismissed the world and its
+Maker from her musings for fear of further irreverences.
+
+One Thought came out of the knothole, illustrated. It was leading a tall
+woman-girl by the hand--no, it was pushing it as though the woman-girl
+were loath to come.
+
+"Come along," urged the new Thought, laughingly. "Here she is--this is
+Rebecca Mary. Rebecca Mary, this is YOU! You needn't be afraid of each
+other, you two. Take a good long look and get acquainted."
+
+The woman-girl was tall and straight. She had Rebecca Mary's hair,
+Rebecca Mary's eyes, mouth, little pointed chin. But not Rebecca Mary's
+legs--unless the long skirts covered them. She was rather comely and
+pleasant to look at. But Rebecca Mary tried not to look.
+
+"She's got a lover---some day she'll be getting married," the new
+Thought said more abruptly, startlingly, than grammatically. And then
+with a little muffled cry Rebecca Mary put out her hands and pushed
+the woman-girl away--back into the knothole whence she had come. The
+Thought, too, for she had no room in her mind for thoughts like that.
+
+"My aunt Olivia wouldn't allow me to think of you," she explained in
+dismissing them. "And," with dignity she added, "neither would Rebecca
+Mary."
+
+It was to be as the minister's wife had prophesied--there were to be not
+even the three days of grace allowed by law when Rebecca Mary grew up.
+Sitting there with her legs, her poor little unappreciated legs, the
+innocent cause of the whole trouble, curled out of sight, Rebecca Mary
+planned that there should be but one day of grace. She would allow one
+day more to be a little girl in, and then she would grow up. But that
+one day--Rebecca Mary got up hastily and went to find Aunt Olivia.
+
+"Aunt Olivia," she began, without preamble--Rebecca Mary never
+preambled--"Aunt Olivia, may I have a holiday tomorrow?"
+
+Aunt Olivia was rocking in her easy chair on the porch. It had taken her
+sixty-two years to learn to sit in an easy chair and rock. Even now, and
+she had been home from the hospital many months, she felt a little
+as though the friendly birds that perched on the porch railing were
+twittering tauntingly, "Plummer! Plummer! Plummer!--rocking in an easy
+chair!"
+
+"May I, Aunt Olivia?" It was an unusual occurrence for Rebecca Mary to
+ask again so soon. But this was an unusual occurrence. Aunt Olivia's
+thin face turned affectionately towards the child.
+
+"School doesn't begin again tomorrow, does it?" she said in surprise.
+Weren't all Rebecca Mary's days now holidays?
+
+"Oh no---no'm. But I mean may I skip my stents? And--and may I soak the
+kettles and pans? Just tomorrow."
+
+"Just tomorrow," repeated bewildered Aunt Olivia--"soak your--stents--"
+
+"Because it's going to be a pretty busy day. It's going to be a--a
+celebration," Rebecca Mary said, softly. There was a strangely exalted
+look on her face. Oddly enough she was not afraid that Aunt Olivia would
+say no.
+
+Aunt Olivia said yes. She did not ask any questions about the
+celebration, on account of the exalted look. She could wait. But the
+bewildered look stayed for a while on her thin face. Rebecca Mary was
+a queer child, a queer child--but she was a dear child. Dearness atoned
+for queerness in Aunt Olivia's creed.
+
+The celebration began early the next morning before Aunt Olivia was up.
+She lay in bed and heard it begin. Rebecca Mary out in the dewy garden
+was singing at the top of her voice. Aunt Olivia had never heard her
+sing like that before--not at the top. Her sweet, shrill voice sounded
+rather unacquainted with such free heights as that, and the woman in the
+bed wondered with a staid little smile if it did not make Rebecca Mary
+feel as she felt when she sat in the easy chair rocking.
+
+Rebecca Mary sang hymns mostly, but interspersed in her programme were
+bits of Mother Goose set to original tunes--she had learned the Mother
+Goose of the minister's Littlest Little Boy--and original bits set to
+familiar tunes. It was a wild little orgy of song.
+
+"My grief!" Aunt Olivia ejaculated under her breath; but she did not
+mean her grief. Other people might think Rebecca Mary was crazy--not
+Aunt Olivia. But yet she wondered a little and found it hard to wait.
+
+Rebecca Mary washed the breakfast cup and plates, but put the pans and
+kettles to soak, and hurried away to her play. There was so much playing
+to be done before the sun set on her opportunity. She had made a little
+programme on a slip of paper, with approximate times allotted to each
+item. As:
+
+   Tree climbing... 1 hr.
+   (Do not tare anything)
+   Mud pies... 1 hr. and 1/2.
+   (Do not get anything muddy)
+   Tea party... 2 hrs.
+   (Do not break anything)
+   Skipping... 1/2 hr.
+
+Rebecca Mary had written 1 hr. at first opposite skipping, but it had
+rather appalled her to think of skipping for so long a period of time,
+and, with a sense of being already out of breath, she had hurriedly
+erased the 1 and substituted 1/2. Underneath she had written, ("Do not
+tip over anything"). All the items had cautionary parentheses
+underneath them, for Rebecca Mary did not wish the celebration to injure
+"anything." Not this last day, when all the days of all the years before
+it, that had gone to make up her little girlhood, nothing had been torn
+or muddied or tipped over.
+
+Rebecca Mary had never climbed trees, had never made mud pies, never had
+tea parties, nor skipped. It was with rather a hesitating step that she
+went forward to meet them all. She was even a little awed. But she went.
+No item on her programme was omitted.
+
+From her rocker on the porch Aunt Olivia watched proceedings with quiet
+patience. It was a good vantage point--she could see nearly all of the
+celebration. The tree Rebecca Mary climbed was on the edge of the old
+orchard next to Aunt Olivia, and there was a providential little rift
+through the shrubbery and vines that intervened. This part of the
+programme she could see almost too clearly, for it must be confessed
+that this part startled Aunt Olivia out of her calm. It--it was so
+unexpected. She stopped rocking and leaned forward in her chair to peer
+more sharply. What was the child--"She's climbing a tree!" breathed Aunt
+Olivia in undisguised astonishment. Even as she breathed it, there came
+to her faintly the snapping of twigs and flutter of leaves. Then all was
+quite still, but she could discern with her pair of trusty Plummer eyes
+two long legs gently dangling.
+
+If Aunt Olivia had known, Rebecca Mary, too, was startled. It--it was so
+strange an experience. She was not in the least afraid--it was a mental
+start rather than a physical one. When she had reached the limb set down
+in her programme she sat on it in a little daze of bewildered delight.
+She liked it!
+
+"Why, why, it's nice!" Rebecca Mary breathed. Her turn had come for
+undisguised astonishment. The leaves all about her nodded to her and
+stroked her cheeks and hair and hands. They whispered things into her
+ears. They were such friendly little leaves!
+
+Nothing looked quite the same up there. It was a little as if she were
+in a new world, and she felt odd thrills of pride, as probably people
+who had discovered countries and rivers and north poles felt. Through
+a rift in the leaves she could see with her good Plummer eyes a swaying
+spot of brown and white that was Aunt Olivia rocking. Suddenly
+Rebecca Mary experienced a pang of remorse that she had wasted so many
+opportunities like this--that this was her only one. She wished she had
+put 2 hrs. instead of 1 hr. over against "Tree climbing," but it was too
+late now. She had borrowed Aunt Olivia's open-faced gold watch to serve
+as timekeeper, and promptly at the expiration of the 1 hr. she slid down
+through the crackling twigs and friendly leaves to the old world below.
+She did not allow herself to look back, but she could not help the sigh.
+It was going to be harder to grow up than she had thought it would be.
+
+The mud pies she made with conscientious care as Rhoda, the minister's
+little girl, had said she used to make them. She made rows and rows of
+them and set them in the sun to bake. There were raisin stones in them
+all and crimped edges around them. It did not take nearly all the 1 hr.
+and 1/2, so she made another and still another batch. When the time was
+up she did not sigh, but she had had rather a good time. How many mud
+pies she HADN'T made in all those years that were to end today!
+
+Olivicia and the little white cat went to the tea party. Rebecca Mary
+thought of inviting Aunt Olivia--she got as far as the porch steps,
+but no farther. She caught a glimpse of her own legs and shrank back
+sensitively. They seemed to have grown since she measured them against
+the woodshed wall. Rebecca Mary felt the contrast between her legs and
+the tea party. Aunt Olivia never knew how near she had come to being
+invited to take part in the celebration, at Article III. on the
+programme.
+
+Rhoda had had tea parties unnumbered, like the sands of the sea. She had
+described them fluently, so Rebecca Mary was not as one in the dark. She
+knew how to cut the bread and the cake into tiny dice, and the cookies
+into tiny rounds. She knew how to make the cambric tea and to arrange
+the jelly and flowers. But Rhoda had forgotten to tell her how to make a
+rose pie--how to select two large rose leaves for upper and under crust,
+and to fill in the pie between them with pink and white rose petals and
+sugar in alternate layers. Press until "done." Why had Rhoda forgotten?
+It seemed a pity that there was no rose pie at Rebecca Mary's tea
+party--and no time left to make one.
+
+"Will you take sugar in your tea, Olivicia?" Rebecca Mary asked, shyly.
+She sat on the ground with her legs drawn under her out of sight, but
+there were little warm spots in her cheeks. She had not expected to
+be--ashamed. If there had been a knothole anywhere, she thought to
+herself, the Thought of Growing Up would have come out of it and
+confronted her and reminded her of her legs.
+
+"Will you help yourself to the bread? Won't you have another cookie?"
+She left nothing out, and gradually the strangeness wore away. It got
+gradually to be a good time. "How many tea parties," thought Rebecca
+Mary, "there might have been!"
+
+Rebecca Mary was skipping, when the minister's wife came to call on Aunt
+Olivia. It was the minister's wife who discovered it. Aunt Olivia
+caught the indrawing of her breath and saw her face. Then Aunt Olivia
+discovered it, and a delicate color overspread her thin cheeks and rose
+to her temples. Now what was the child--
+
+"Rhoda is a great skipper," the minister's wife said, hurriedly. But it
+was the wrong thing--she knew it was the wrong thing.
+
+"Rebecca Mary is having a--celebration," hurried Aunt Olivia; but she
+wished she had not, for it seemed like trying to excuse Rebecca Mary.
+She, too, had said the wrong thing.
+
+"How pleasant it is out here!" tried again the minister's wife.
+
+"Yes, it's cool," Aunt Olivia agreed, gratefully. After that the things
+they said were right things. The fantastic little figure down there in
+the orchard, skipping wildly, determinedly, was in none of them. Both
+of them felt it to be safer. But the minister's wife's gaze dwelt on the
+skipping figure and followed it through its amazing mazes, in spite of
+the minister's wife.
+
+"I couldn't have helped it, Robert," she said. "Not if you'd been there
+preaching 'Thou shalt not' to me! You would have looked too, while you
+were preaching. You can't imagine, sitting there at that desk, what the
+temptation was--Robert, you don't suppose Rebecca Mary has gone crazy?"
+
+"Felicia! You frighten me!"
+
+"No, _I_ don't suppose either. But it was certainly very strange. It was
+almost ALARMING, Robert. And she didn't know how at all. I wanted to go
+down and show her!"
+
+"It seems to me"--the minister spoke impressively "that it is not
+Rebecca Mary who has gone crazy--"
+
+"Why, the idea! Haven't I made it plain?" laughed she. "I'll speak in A
+B C's then. Rebecca Mary was SKIPPING, Robert--skipping skipping."
+
+"Then it's Rebecca Mary," the minister murmured.
+
+"That's what I'm afraid--didn't I say so? Or else it's her second
+childhood--"
+
+"First, you mean. If THAT'S it, don't let's say a word, dear--don't
+breathe, Felicia, for fear we'll stop it."
+
+"Dear child!" the minister's wife said, tenderly. "I wish I'd gone down
+there and shown her how. And I'd have told her--Robert, I'd have told
+her how to climb a tree! Don't tell the parish."
+
+The day was to end at sunset, from sunrise to sunset, Rebecca Mary had
+decreed. The last article on her crumpled little programme was, "Saying
+Good-by to Olivicia(Don't cry)." It was going to be the most difficult
+thing of all the articles. Olivicia had existed so short a time
+comparatively--it might not have been as difficult if there had always
+been an Olivicia. "Or it might have been harder," Rebecca Mary said. She
+went towards that article with reluctant feet. But it had to come.
+
+The bureau drawer was all ready. Rebecca Mary had lined it with
+something white and soft and sweetened it with dried rose petals spiced
+in the century-old Plummer way. It bore rather grewsome resemblance to
+Olivicia's coffin, but it was not grewsome to Rebecca Mary. She laid the
+doll in it with the tender little swinging motion mothers use in laying
+down their tiny sleepers.
+
+"There, there the-re!" crooned Rebecca Mary, softly, brooding over the
+beautiful being. "You'll rest there sweetly after your mother is grown
+up. And you'll try not to miss her, won't you? You'll understand,
+Olivicia?--oh, Olivicia!" But she did not cry. Her eyes were very
+bright. For several minutes she stood there stooped over painfully,
+gazing down into the cof--the bureau drawer, wherein lay peaceful
+Olivicia. She was saying good-bye in her heart--she never said it aloud.
+
+"Dear," very softly indeed, "you are sure you understand? Everybody has
+to grow up, dear. It--it hurts, but you have to. I mean I'VE got to.
+I wouldn't so soon if it wasn't for my legs. But they keep right on
+growing--they're awful, dear!--I can't stop 'em. Olivicia, lie right
+there and be thankful you're a doll! But I wish you could open your eyes
+and look at me just once more."
+
+Rebecca Mary shut the drawer gently. It was over--no, she would say one
+thing more to the beautiful being in there. She bent to the keyhole.
+
+"Olivicia!" she called in a tender whisper, "I shall be right here
+nights. We shan't be far away from each other."
+
+But it would not be like lying in each other's arms--oh, not at all like
+that. Rebecca Mary caught her breath; it was perilously like a sob. Then
+she girded up her loins and went away to meet her fate--the common fate
+of all.
+
+She was very tired. The day had been a strain upon her that was
+beginning now to tell. To put all one's childhood into one day--that is
+not easy.
+
+Article VI. was the last. In a way, it was a rest to Rebecca Mary, for
+it entailed merely a visit to the woodshed. She could sit quietly on the
+floor opposite the knothole and wait for the Thoughts. If the Thought of
+Growing Up came out tonight, she would say: "Oh, well, you may stay--you
+needn't go back. I'm not any glad to see you, but I'm ready. I suppose I
+shall get used to you."
+
+What Thoughts came out of the knothole to Rebecca Mary she never told
+to any one. It was nearly dark when she went away, planting her feet
+firmly, holding her head straight--Rebecca Mary Plummer. She went to
+find Aunt Olivia and tell her. On the way, she stopped to get
+Aunt Olivia's shawl, for it was getting chilly out on the porch.
+Significantly the first thing Rebecca Mary did after she began to grow
+up was to get the shawl and lay it over Aunt Olivia's spare shoulders.
+The second thing was to bend to the scant gray hair and lightly rub it
+with her cheek. It was a Rebecca Mary kiss.
+
+Out in front of the rocking chair, still straight and firm, she told
+Aunt Olivia.
+
+"It's over--I think I put everything in," she said. "I thought you ought
+to know, so I came to tell you. I'm ready to grow up."
+
+After all, if Rebecca Mary had known, her "programme" had not ended
+with Article VI. Here was another. Take the pencil in your steady little
+fingers, Rebecca Mary, and write:
+
+Article VII.--Growing up. (Do not break Aunt Olivia's heart.)
+
+
+
+
+Un-Plummered
+
+
+
+Aunt Olivia sighed. It was the third time since she had begun to let
+Rebecca Mary down. The third sigh was the longest one. Oh, this letting
+down of children who would grow up!
+
+"I won't do it!" Aunt Olivia rebelled, fiercely, but she took up her
+scissors again at Duty's nudge.
+
+"You don't want people laughing at her, do you?" Duty said, sensibly.
+"Well, then, rip out that hem and face up that skirt and stop sighing.
+What can't be cured must be endur--"
+
+"I'm ripping it out," Aunt Olivia interrupted, crisply. But Duty was not
+to be silenced.
+
+"You ought to have done it before," dictatorially. "You've known all
+along that Rebecca Mary was growing up."
+
+Aunt Olivia, like the proverbial worm, turned.
+
+"I didn't know till Rebecca Mary told me," she retorted; then the
+rebellion died out of her thin face and tenderness came and took its
+place. Aunt Olivia was thinking of the time when Rebecca Mary told her.
+She gazed past Duty, past the skirt across her knees, out through the
+porch vines, and saw Rebecca Mary coming to tell her. She saw the shawl
+the child was bringing, felt it laid on her shoulders, and something
+else laid on her hair, soft and smooth like a little, lean, brown cheek.
+The memory was so pleasant that Aunt Olivia closed her eyes to make it
+stay. When she opened them some one was coming along the path, but it
+was not Rebecca Mary.
+
+"Good afternoon!" some one said. Aunt Olivia stiffened into a Plummer
+again with hurried embarrassment. She did not recognize the voice nor
+the pleasant young face that followed it through the vines.
+
+"It's Rebecca Mary's aunt, isn't it?" The stranger smiled. "I should
+know it by the family resemblance."
+
+"We're both Plummers," Aunt Olivia answered, gravely. "Won't you come up
+on the porch and take a seat?"
+
+"No, I'll sit down here on the steps--I'd rather. I think I'll sit
+on the lowest step for I've come on a very humble errand! I'm Rebecca
+Mary's teacher."
+
+"Oh!" It was all Aunt Olivia could manage, for a sudden horror had
+come upon her. She had a distinct remembrance of being at the Tony
+Trumbullses when the school teacher came to call.
+
+"It's--it's rather hard to say it." The young person on the lowest step
+laughed nervously. "I'd a good deal rather not. But I think so much of
+Rebecca Mary--"
+
+The horror grew in Aunt Olivia's soul. It was something terribly like
+that the Tony Trumbullses' teacher had said. And like this:
+
+"It hurts--there! But I made up my mind it was my duty to come up here
+and say it, and so I've come. I'm sorry to have to say--"
+
+"Don't!" ejaculated Aunt Olivia, trembling on her Plummer pedestal. For
+she was laboring with the impulse to refuse to listen to this intruder,
+to drive her away--to say: "I won't believe a word you say! You may as
+well go home."
+
+"Hoity-toity!" breathed Duty in her ear. It saved her.
+
+"Well?" she said, gently. "Go on."
+
+"I'm sorry to say I can't teach Rebecca Mary any more, Miss Plummer.
+That's what I came to tell you--"
+
+This was awful--awful! But hot rebellion rose in Aunt Olivia's heart.
+There was some mistake--it was some other Rebecca Mary this person
+meant. She would never believe it was HERS--the Plummer one!
+
+"Because I've taught her all I know. There! Do you wonder I chose the
+lowest step to sit on? But it's the truth, honest," the little teacher
+laughed girlishly, but there were shame spots on her cheeks--"Rebecca
+Mary is the smartest scholar I've got, and I've taught her all I know."
+In her voice there was confession to having taught Rebecca Mary a little
+more than that. The shame spots flickered in a halo of humble honesty.
+
+"She's been from Percentage through the arithmetic four times--Rebecca
+Mary's splendid in arithmetic. And she knows the geography and grammar
+by heart."
+
+The look on Aunt Olivia's face! The transition from horror to pride was
+overwhelming, transfiguring.
+
+"Rebecca Mary's smart," added the honest one on the doorstep. "_I_ think
+she ought to have a chance. There! That's all I came for, so I'll
+be going. Only, I don't suppose--you don't think you'll have to tell
+Rebecca Mary, do you? About--about me, I mean?"
+
+"No, I don't," Aunt Olivia assured her, warmly. Her thin, lined hand met
+and held for a moment the small, plump one--long enough to say, "You're
+a good girl--I like you," in its own way. The little teacher went away
+in some sort comforted for having taught Rebecca Mary all she knew.
+She even hummed a relieved little tune on her way home, because of the
+pleasant tingle in the hand that Rebecca Mary's aunt had squeezed. After
+all, no matter how much you dreaded doing it, it was better to tell the
+truth.
+
+Aunt Olivia hummed no relieved little tune. The pride in her heart
+battled with the Dread there and went down. Aunt Olivia did not call the
+Dread by any other name. It was Duty who dared.
+
+Confronting Aunt Olivia: "I suppose you know what it means? I suppose
+you know it means you've got to give Rebecca Mary a chance? When are you
+going to send her away to school?"
+
+"Oh--don't!" pleaded Aunt Olivia. "You don't give me any time. There's
+no need of hurry--"
+
+"I'm still a Plummer, if you're not," broke in Duty, with ironic
+sharpness. "The Plummers were never afraid to look their duty in the
+face."
+
+"I'm--I'm looking at you," groaned Aunt Olivia, climbing painfully back
+on to her pedestal. "Go ahead and say it. I'm ready--only I guess you've
+forgot how long I've had Rebecca Mary. When you've brought a child up--"
+
+"I brought her up myself," calmly. "I ought to know. She wouldn't have
+been Rebecca Mary, would she, if I hadn't been right on hand? Who was
+it taught her to sew patchwork before she was four years old? And make
+sheets--and beds--and bread? Who was it kept her from being a little
+tomboy like the minister's girl? Who taught her to walk instead of run,
+and eat with her fork, and be a lady? Who was it--"
+
+"Oh, you--you!" sighed Aunt Olivia, trembling for her balance. "You did
+'em all. I never could've alone."
+
+"Then"--Duty was justly complacent--"Then perhaps you'll be willing to
+leave Rebecca Mary's going away to school to me. She must go at once, as
+soon as you can get her read--"
+
+Aunt Olivia tumbled off. She did not wait to pick herself up before she
+turned upon this Duty that delighted in torturing her.
+
+"You better get her ready yourself! You better let her down and make her
+some nightgowns and count her pocket-handkerchiefs! You think you can do
+anything--no, I'M talking now! I guess it's my turn. I guess I've waited
+long enough. Maybe you brought Rebecca Mary up, but I'm not going to
+leave it to you whether she'd ought to go away to school. She's my
+Rebecca Mary, isn't she? Well? It's me that loves her, isn't it--not
+you? If I can't love her and stay a Plummer, then I'll--love her. I'm
+going to leave it to the minister."
+
+The minister was a little embarrassed. The wistful look in Aunt Olivia's
+eyes said, "Say no" so plainly. And he knew he must say yes--the
+minister's Duty was imperative, too.
+
+"If she can't get any more good out of the school here--" he began.
+
+"She can't," said Aunt Olivia's Duty for her. "The teacher says she
+can't. Rebecca Mary's smart." Then Duty, too, was proud of Rebecca Mary!
+
+"I know she is," said the minister, heartily. "My Rhoda--you ought to
+hear my Rhoda set her up. She thinks Rebecca Mary knows more than the
+teacher does."
+
+"Rhoda's smart, too," breathed Duty in Aunt Olivia's ear.
+
+"So you see, dear Miss Olivia, the child would make good use of any
+advantage--"
+
+"You mean I ought to send her away? Well, I'm ready to--I said I'd leave
+it to you. Where shall I send her? If there was only--I don't suppose
+there's some place near to? Children go home Friday nights sometimes,
+don't they?"
+
+"There is no school near enough for that, I'm afraid," the minister
+said, gently. He could not bear the look in Miss Olivia's eyes.
+
+"It hurt," he told his wife afterwards. "I wish she hadn't asked me,
+Felicia."
+
+"I know, dear, but it's the penalty of being a minister. Ministers'
+hearts ought to be coated with--with asbestos or something, so the looks
+in people's eyes wouldn't burn through. I'm glad she didn't ask ME!"
+
+"It will nearly kill them both," ran on the minister's thoughts, aloud.
+"You know how it was when Miss Olivia was at the hospital."
+
+"Robert!"--the minister's wife's tone was reproachful--"you're talking
+in the future tense! You said 'will.' Then you advised her to send
+Rebecca Mary away!"
+
+"Guilty," pleaded the minister. "What else could I do?"
+
+"You could have offered to teach her yourself"--with prompt inspiration.
+"Oh, Robert, why didn't you?"
+
+"Felicia!--my dear!"--for the minister was modest.
+
+"You know plenty for two Rebecca Marys," she triumphed. "Didn't you
+appropriate all the honors at college, you selfish boy!"
+
+"It's too late now, dear." But the minister's eyes thanked her, and the
+big clasp of his arms. A minister may be mortal.
+
+"Maybe it is and maybe it isn't," spoke the minister's wife, in riddles.
+"We'll wait and see."
+
+"But, Felicia--but, dear, they're both them Plummers."
+
+"Maybe they are and maybe they aren't," laughed she.
+
+That night Aunt Olivia told Rebecca Mary--after she went to bed, quite
+calmly:
+
+"Rebecca Mary, how would you like to go away to school? For I'm going to
+send you, my dear."
+
+"'Away--to school--my dear!'" echoed Rebecca Mary, sitting upright in
+bed. Her slight figure stretched up rigid and preternaturally tall in
+the dim light.
+
+"Yes; the minister advises it--I left it to him. He thinks you ought to
+have advantages." Aunt Olivia slipped down suddenly beside the little
+rigid figure and touched it rather timidly. She felt a little in awe of
+the Rebecca Mary who knew more than her teacher did.
+
+"They all seem to think you're--smart, my dear," Aunt Olivia said, and
+she would scarcely have believed it could be so hard to say it. For the
+life of her she could not keep the pride from pricking through her tone.
+The wild temptation to sell her Plummer birthright for a kiss assailed
+her. But she groped in the dimness for Duty's cool touch and found it.
+In the Plummer code of laws it was writ, "Thou shalt not kiss."
+
+"I'm going right to work to make you some new nightgowns," Aunt Olivia
+added, hastily. "I think I shall make them plain," for it was in the
+nature of a reinforcement to her courage to leave off the ruffles.
+
+Rebecca Mary's eyes shone like stars in the dark little room. The child
+thought she was glad to be going away to school.
+
+"Shall I study algebra and Latin?" she demanded.
+
+"I suppose so--that'll be what you go for."
+
+"And French--not FRENCH?"
+
+"Likely."
+
+Rebecca Mary fell back on the pillows to grasp it. But she was presently
+up again.
+
+"And that thing that tells about the air and--and gassy things? And the
+one that tells about your bones?"
+
+Aunt Olivia did not recognize chemistry, but she knew bones. She sighed
+gently.
+
+"Oh yes; I suppose you'll find out just how you're put together, and
+likely it'll scare you so you won't ever dare to breathe deep again.
+Maybe learning like that is important--I suppose the minister knows."
+
+"The minister knows everything," Rebecca Mary said, solemnly. "If you
+let me go away to school, I'll try to learn to know as much as he does,
+Aunt Olivia. You don't--you don't think he'd mind, do you?"
+
+In the dark Aunt Olivia smiled. The small person there on the pillows
+was, after all, a child. Rebecca Mary had not grown up, after all!
+
+"He won't mind," promised Aunt Olivia for the minister. She went
+away presently and cut out Rebecca Mary's new nightgowns. She sat and
+stitched them, far into the night, and stitched her sad little bodings
+in, one by one. Already desolation gripped Aunt Olivia's heart.
+
+Rebecca Mary's dreams that night were marvelous ones. She dreamed she
+saw herself in a glass after she had learned all the things there were
+to learn, and she looked like the minister! When she spoke, her voice
+sounded deep and sweet like the minister's voice. Somewhere a voice like
+the minister's wife's seemed to be calling "Robert! Robert!"
+
+"Yes?" answered Rebecca Mary, and woke up.
+
+There were many preparations to make. The days sped by busily, and to
+Rebecca Mary full of joyous expectancy. Aunt Olivia made no moan. She
+worked steadily over the plain little outfit and thrust her Dreads away
+with resolute courage, to wait until Rebecca Mary was gone. Time enough
+then.
+
+"You're doing right--that ought to comfort you," encouraged Duty,
+kindly.
+
+"Clear out!" was what Aunt Olivia cried out, sharply, in answer. "You've
+done enough--this is all your work! Don't stand there hugging yourself.
+YOU'RE not going to miss Rebecca Mary--"
+
+"I shall miss her," Duty murmured. "I was awake all night, too, dreading
+it. You didn't know, but I was there."
+
+The last day, when it came, seemed a little--a good deal--like that
+other day when Aunt Olivia went away, only it was the other way about
+this time. Rebecca Mary was going away on this day. The things packed
+snugly in the big valise were her things; it was she, Rebecca Mary, who
+would unpack them in a wondrous, strange place. It was Rebecca Mary the
+minister's wife and Rhoda came to bid good-bye.
+
+Aunt Olivia went to the station in the stage with the child. She did not
+speak much on the way, but sat firmly straight and smiled. Duty had told
+her the last thing to smile. But Duty had not trusted her; unseen and
+uninvited, Duty had slipped into the jolting old vehicle between Aunt
+Olivia and Rebecca Mary.
+
+"She isn't the Plummer she was once," sighed Duty.
+
+But at the little station, in those few final moments, two Plummers, an
+old one and a young one, waited quietly together. Neither of them broke
+down nor made ado. Duty retired in palpable chagrin.
+
+"Good-bye, my dear," Aunt Olivia said, steadily, though her lips were
+white.
+
+"Good-bye, Aunt Olivia," Rebecca Mary Plummer said, steadily. "I'm very
+MUCH obliged to you for sending me."
+
+"You're--welcome. Don't forget to wear your rubbers. I put in some
+liniment in case you need it--don't get any in your eyes."
+
+Outside on the platform Aunt Olivia sought and found Rebecca Mary's
+window and stood beside it till the train started. Through the dusty
+pane their faces looked oddly unfamiliar to each other, and the two
+pairs of eyes that gazed out and in had a startled wistfulness in them
+that no Plummer eyes should have. If Duty had staid--
+
+The train shook itself, gave a jerk or two, and plunged down the shining
+rails. Aunt Olivia watched it out of sight, then turned patiently to
+meet her loneliness. The Dreads came flocking back to her as if she had
+beckoned to them. For now was the time.
+
+The letters Rebecca Mary wrote were formally correct and brief. There
+was no homesickness in them. It was pleasant at the school, that book
+about bones was going to be very interesting. Aunt Olivia was not to
+worry about the rubbers, and Rebecca Mary would never forget to air her
+clothes when they came from the wash. Yes, she had aired the nightgown
+that Aunt Olivia ironed the last thing. No, she hadn't needed any
+liniment yet, but she wouldn't get any in her eyes.
+
+Aunt Olivia's letters were to the point and calm, as though Duty stood
+peering over her shoulder as she wrote. She was glad Rebecca Mary
+liked the bones, but she was a little surprised. She was glad about the
+rubbers and the wash; she was glad there had been no need yet for the
+liniment. It was a good thing to rub on a sore throat. The minister's
+wife had been over with her work she said Rhoda missed Rebecca Mary.
+Yes, the little, white cat was well--no, she hadn't caught any mice.
+The calla lily had two buds, the Northern Spy tree was not going to bear
+very well.
+
+"Robert, I've been to see Miss Olivia," the minister's wife said at tea.
+
+"Yes?" The minister waited. He knew it was coming.
+
+"She was knitting stockings for Rebecca Mary. Robert, she sat there and
+smiled till I had to come home to cry!"
+
+"My dear!--do you want me to cry, too?"
+
+"I'm a-going to," sniffed Rhoda. "I feel it coming."
+
+"She is so lonely, Robert! It would break your heart to see her smile.
+How do I know she is? Oh no--no, she didn't say she was! But I saw her
+eyes and she let the little, white cat get up in her lap!"
+
+"Proof enough," the minister said, gently.
+
+Between the two of them--the child at school and Aunt Olivia at
+home--letters came and went for six weeks. Aunt Olivia wrote six,
+Rebecca Mary six. All the letters were terse and brief and unemotional.
+Weather, bones, little white cats, liniment--everything in them but
+loneliness or love. Rebecca Mary began all hers "Dear Aunt Olivia," and
+ended them all "Respectfully your niece, Rebecca Mary Plummer."
+
+"Dear Rebecca Mary," began Aunt Olivia's. "Your aff. aunt, Olivia
+Plummer," they closed. Yet both their hearts were breaking. Some hearts
+break quicker than others; Plummer hearts hold out splendidly, but in
+the end--
+
+In the end Aunt Olivia went to see the minister and was closeted with
+him for a little. The minister's wife could hear them talking--mostly
+the minister--but she could not hear what they said.
+
+"It's come," she nodded, sagely. "I was sure it would. That's what the
+little, white cat purred when she rubbed against my skirts, 'She can't
+stand it much longer. She doesn't sleep nights nor eat days--she's
+giving out.' Poor Miss Olivia!--but I can't understand Rebecca Mary."
+
+"It's the Plummer in her," the little, white cat would have purred. "You
+wait!"
+
+Aunt Olivia turned back at the minister's study door. "Then you will?"
+she said, eagerly. "You're perfectly willing to? I don't want to feel--"
+
+"You needn't feel," the minister smiled. "I'm more than willing. I'm
+delighted. But in the matter of--er--remuneration, I cannot let you--"
+
+"You needn't let me," smiled Miss Olivia; "I'll do it without." She was
+gently radiant. Her pitifully thin face, so transfigured, touched the
+big heart of the minister. He went to his window and watched the slight
+figure hurry away. He would scarcely have been surprised to see it turn
+down the road that led towards the railway station.
+
+"Oh, Robert!" It was the minister's wife at his elbow. "You dear boy, I
+know you've promised! You needn't tell me a thing--didn't I suggest it
+in the first place? Dear Miss Olivia--I'm so glad, Robert! So are you
+glad, you minister!" But they were neither of them thinking of little,
+stubbed-out shoes that would be easier to buy.
+
+Aunt Olivia turned down the station road the next morning, in the
+swaying old stage. Her eager gaze never left the plodding horses, as if
+by looking at them she could make them go faster.
+
+"They're pretty slow, aren't they?" she said.
+
+"Slow--THEM? Well, I guess you weren't never a stage horse!" chuckled
+the old man at the reins.
+
+"No," admitted Aunt Olivia, "I never was, but I know I'd go faster
+today."
+
+At the Junction, halfway to Rebecca Mary, she descended alertly from the
+train and crossed the platform. She must wait here, they told her, an
+hour and twenty minutes. On the other side of the station a train was
+just slowing up, and she stood a moment to scan idly the thin stream
+of people that trickled from the cars. There were old women--did any of
+them, she wondered, feel as happy as she did? There were tall children,
+too. There was one--Aunt Olivia started a little and fumbled in her soft
+hair, under the roses in her bonnet brim, for her glasses. There was
+one tall child--she was coming this way--she was coming fast--she was
+running! Her arms were out--
+
+"Aunt Olivia! Aunt Olivia!" the Tall Child was crying out, joyously,
+"Oh, Aunt Olivia!"
+
+"Rebecca Mary!--my dear, my dear!"
+
+They were in each other's arms. The roses on Aunt Olivia's bonnet brim
+slipped to one side--the two of them, not Plummers any more, but a
+common, glad old woman and a common, glad, tall child, were kissing each
+other as though they would never stop. The stream of people reached them
+and flowed by on either side. Trains came and went, and still they stood
+like that.
+
+"Hoity-toity!" muttered Aunt Olivia's Duty, and slipped past with the
+stream. A Plummer to the end, what use to stay any longer there?
+
+"I was coming home," cried Rebecca Mary. "I couldn't bear it another
+minute!"
+
+"I was coming after you--my dear, my DEAR, _I_ couldn't bear it another
+minute!"
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Rebecca Mary, by Annie Hamilton Donnell
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK REBECCA MARY ***
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