At the supper table, she remarked to Cephas and her sister Rody: “I do hope our new minister will have a good wife. Bensalem needs the ministry of a woman—a real deaconess.”
“As if you weren’t one,” said Cephas, with admiration in his eyes.
“Nor anybody else’s,” retorted Aunt Rody, sharply, with a look at the bald-headed, white-whiskered man opposite her at the foot of the table. The look passed over him instead of going through him, as he gave a laugh, a contented laugh that hurt Aunt Rody, even more than she had intended her look to hurt him.
Those two would circumvent her some day; the longer she lived the more sure she was of it, and the more would it cut her to the quick. Every year she fought against it (if one can fight with no antagonist), the more rebelliously she was set against it. There was but one hope for her: that she would outlive one of them; she hoped to outlive both of them.
“Creatures of reason do not necessarily become unreasonable when they consent to walk by faith; nor do creatures of trust necessarily become faithless when they are gladdened in a walk by sight.”
Judith sat in the bay-window with a book in her lap; a box of books had come by express to Miss Judith G. Mackenzie the very day her Cousin Don sailed for Genoa; they were books written for children; they were all Judith’s own.
With the light of the sunset in her face, Judith sat reading Jean Ingelow’s “Stories Told to a Child.”
“O mother, it is too splendid for anything,” she exclaimed; “when you are rested I will read it to you.”
“All made. Mrs. Kindare put up the cot herself and lent me two blankets. It is a cunning room; Aunt Affy will like it; Mrs. Kindare said she could spare the room better than not, and Aunt Affy may stay a month, waiting until we can go home with her.”
“Put away your book, dear; and come and sit on the rug close to me. I want to be all alone with my little girl once more before Aunt Affy comes.”
Reluctantly Judith closed the book; she remembered afterward that she thought she would rather finish the story than go and sit on the rug and talk to her mother.
“Mother,” she began, as brightly as though a minute ago she had not wished to finish the story first, “Don might have stayed with us all winter and had that room to sleep in.”