For an instant Marjorie was paralyzed with horror; then she stifled a shriek and stood still gazing down through quick tears upon the yellow fragments. Fortunately her grandmother, being very deaf, had passed the door and heard no sound. What would have happened to her if her grandmother had looked in!
How disappointed Miss Prudence would be! It belonged to her friend and how could she remedy the loss?
Stooping, with eyes so blinded with tears that she could scarcely see the pieces she took into her hand, she picked up each bit, and then on the spur of the moment hid them among the thick branches of hemlock. Now what was she to do next? Could she earn money to buy another hundred-years-old yellow pitcher? And if she could earn the money, where could she find the pitcher? She would not confess to Miss Prudence until she found some way of doing something for her. Oh, dear! This was not the kind of thing that she had been wishing would happen! And how could she go down with such a face to hear the rest about punctuation?
"Marjorie! Marjorie!" shouted Uncle James from below, "here's Cap'n Rheid at the gate, and if you want to catch a ride you'd better go a ways with him."
The opportunity to run away was better than the ride; hastening down to the hammock she laid the Bible in Miss Prudence's lap.
"I have to go, you see," she exclaimed, hurriedly, averting her face.
"Then our desultory conversation must be finished another time."
"If that's what it means, it means delightful!" said Marjorie. "Thank you, and good-bye."
The blue muslin vanished between the rows of currant bushes. She was hardly a radiant vision as she flew down to the gate; in those few minutes what could have happened to the child?
The old voice and the old pet name; no one thought of calling her "Mousie" but Hollis Rheid.
Her mother said she was noisier than she used to be; perhaps he would not call her Mousie now if he could hear her sing about the house and run up and down stairs and shout when she played games at school. That time when she was so quiet and afraid of everybody seemed ages ago; ages ago before Hollis went to New York. He had returned home once since, but she had been at her grandfather's and had not seen him. Springing to the ground, he caught her in his arms, this tall, strange boy, who had changed so much, and yet who had not changed at all, and lifted her into the back of the open wagon.