“Very well indeed,” Mrs. Greenough said, as she finished reading them; “I could ask nothing better. Can you be ready to come at once?”
“To-morrow, if you wish, madam,” was the answer; and then Mrs. Graham went away.
Kitty Greenough was an impulsive, imaginative girl; no subject was too dull or too unpromising for her fancy to touch it. She made a story for herself about every new person who came in her way. After Number Eleven had gone down the stairs, Kitty laughed.
“Isn’t she a sobersides, mamma? I don’t believe there’ll be any frisk in my dresses at all if she trims them.”
“There’ll be frisk enough in them if you wear them,” her mother answered, smiling at the bright, saucy, winsome face of her one tall daughter.
Kitty was ready to turn the conversation.
“What do you think she is, mamma,--wife or widow?” And then answering her own question: “I think she’s married, and he’s sick, and she has to take care of him. That solemn, still way she has comes of much staying in a sick-room. She’s in the habit of keeping quiet, don’t you see? I wish she were a little prettier; I think he would get well quicker.”
“There’d be no plain, quiet people in your world if you made one,” her mother said, smiling; “but you’d make a mistake to leave them out. You would get tired even of the sun if it shone all the time.”
The next day the new seamstress came, and a thoroughly good one she proved; “better even than Lizzie,” Mrs. Greenough said, and this was high praise. She sewed steadily, and never opened her lips except to ask some question about her work. Even Kitty, who used to boast that she could make a dumb man talk, had not audacity enough to intrude on the reserve in which Mrs. Graham intrenched herself.
“_He’s_ worse this morning,” whispered saucy Kitty to her mother; “and she can do nothing but think about him and mind her gathers.”
But, by the same token, “_he_” must have been worse every day, for during the two weeks she sewed there Mrs. Graham never spoke of any thing beyond her work.
When Mrs. Greenough had paid her, the last night, she said,--
“Please give me your address, Mrs. Graham, for I may want to find you again.”
“17 Hudson Street, ma’am, up two flights of stairs; and if I’m not there Tom always is.”