“I wish mother could talk to her.”

“Marjorie! you have said it.  Your mother is the one.  I will send her to your mother in the spring.  Morris and I will pay her board, and she shall keep close to your happy mother as long as they are both willing.”

“Will Morris let you help pay her board?”

“Morris cannot help himself.  He never resists me.  Now go upstairs and kiss her, and tell her you are her boy’s twin-sister.”

Before the light tap on her door Mrs. Kemlo heard, and her heart was stirred as she heard it, the pleading, hopeful, trusting strains of “Jesus, lover of my soul.”

Moving about in her own chamber, with her door open, Marjorie sang it all before she crossed the hall and gave her light tap on Mrs. Kemlo’s door.

When Marjorie saw the face—­the sorrowful, delicate face, and listened to the refined accent and pretty choice of words, she knew that Morris Kemlo was a gentleman because his mother was a lady.

Prue wandered around the kitchen, looking at things and asking questions.  Deborah was never cross to Prue.

It was a sunny kitchen in the afternoon, the windows faced west and south and Deborah’s plants throve.  Miss Prudence had taken great pleasure in making Deborah’s living room a room for body and spirit to keep strong in.  Old Deborah said there was not another room in the house like the kitchen; “and to think that Miss Prudence should put a lounge there for my old bones to rest on.”

Prue liked the kitchen because of the plants.  It was very funny to see such tiny sweet alyssum, such dwarfs of geranium, such a little bit of heliotrope, and only one calla among those small leaves.

“Just wait till you go to California with us, Deborah,” she remarked this afternoon.  “I’ll show you flowers.”

“I’m too old to travel, Miss Prue.”

“No, you are not.  I shall take you when I go.  I can wait on Morris’ mother, can’t I?  Marjorie said she and I were to help you if she came.”

“Miss Marjorie is good help.”

“So am I,” said Prue, hopping into the dining-room and amusing herself by stepping from one green pattern in the carpet to another green one, and then from one red to another red one, and then, as her summons did not come, from a green to a red and a red to a green, and still Aunt Prue did not call her.  Then she went back to Deborah, who was making lemon jelly, at one of the kitchen tables, in a great yellow bowl.  She told Prue that some of it was to go to a lady in consumption, and some to a little boy who had a hump on his back.  Prue said that she would take it to the little boy, because she had never seen a hump on a boy’s back; she had seen it on camels in a picture.

Still Aunt Prue did not come for her, and she counted thirty-five bells on the arbutilon, and four buds on the monthly rose, and pulled off three drooping daisies that Deborah had not attended to, and then listened, and “Prue!  Prue!” did not come.