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"Lucy," said she, and her voice shook a little, "I'm tired." "So am I," murmured Lucy. "And I don't ever remember to have been tired after a picnic at the old fort before." "No more do I," said Lucy; and it was a moment before their sadness, as usual, trembled into laughter. "Lucy Eastman," said Mary Leonard, suddenly, "this is the street that old Miss Pinsett used to live on lives on, I mean.
She had asked for it a quarter of an hour before, but Claudia had forgotten so trivial a matter in the statement of her own woes. Now she looked keenly at her mother to see if this request was but an attempt to create a diversion. But the drawn look was sufficient. She hastily measured out the medicine, and as hastily left the room saying, "I will send Pinsett to you at once." Pinsett was Mrs.
Mary Leonard's dimples came and went, and delicate waves of color flowed and ebbed in Lucy Eastman's soft cheeks. "I'm too old always to remember that there's no telling a United States senator anything," retorted Miss Pinsett, with a keen glance from her dimmed but penetrating eyes.
Haberton recovered very slowly, and was warned always to use the utmost care. Mrs. Haberton, when the worst of her husband's illness was over, showed signs of collapse herself. Claudia gave herself up to a new ministry. Her mother no longer called for Pinsett; Mr. Haberton found an admirable successor to his trained nurse.
"But I don't know any songs, Miss Pinsett," stammered Mary Leonard. "I have forgotten all I ever knew," echoed Lucy Eastman. "No excuses, now no excuses! You were always great for excuses, but you would always sing for me. I want 'County Guy, to begin with." By a common impulse the visitors moved slowly towards the piano; they would try, at least, since Miss Pinsett wanted them to.
Lucy seated herself and struck a few uncertain chords. Possibly the once familiar room, Mary Leonard at her side, Miss Pinsett listening in her own high-backed chair, the scent of the mignonette in the blue bowl possibly one or all of these things brought back the old tune. "Ah, County Guy, The hour is nigh, The sun has left the lea."
To have helped him in sickness would have seemed a pleasant duty even to Claudia, who had contrived to overlook her mother's frail health. And others were serving him that weak mother; Pinsett, too; and perhaps a hired nurse. It was unbearable.
Miss Pinsett had been disappointed in love, so they said." "They will have old maids disappointed in love," said Lucy, with some asperity. "They will have me some people and I never was." "I know you weren't. But I don't think it's as usual as it was to say that about old maids. It's more the fashion now to be disappointed in marriage." There had been several stops at the stations along the road.
"As to that, I don't believe I'd ever have been a United States senator if it wasn't for what you've told me, Miss Pinsett," laughed Endover. "I'm always coming here to be taken down, Mary," he went on; "she does it just as she used to."
It was the same kind of cake, and might have been cut off the same loaf. "Never any cake like yours," said Mary Leonard. "I remember you like my cake," said old Miss Pinsett, smiling; "take a bigger piece, child." They wanted to know many things about the people and the town, all of which Miss Pinsett could tell them.
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