_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.
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