“Isn’t it darling?” she said as she raised her head for a half-second, then immediately dropped her eyes and went on printing her stitches carefully.  “What else was in that box, I feel I need to know?” she asked.

“Let me see!  The dozen little shirts, they were made out of some of my own trousseau things because of a scarcity of linen in those days, and two little embroidered caps and a blue cashmere sack and a set of crocheted socks and—­and the major sent brandy, he always does.  I have the letter she wrote me about it all.  And to think she had to leave—­” Mrs. Matilda’s eyes misted as she paused to thread her needle.

“She didn’t realize—­that, and think of what she felt when she opened the box,” said Caroline as she raised her eyes that smiled through a threatened shower.  “Oh, I mustn’t let the tears fall on Little Sister’s ruffle!” she added quickly as she took up her work.

“That reminds me of an accident to the shirts I made for Phoebe.  They were being bleached in the sun when a calf took a fancy to them and chewed two of them entirely up before we discovered him.  I was so provoked, for I had no more linen as fine as I wanted.”

“Of course the calf ate up my shirts,” came in Phoebe’s laughing voice from the doorway where she had been standing unobserved for several minutes, watching Mrs. Buchanan and Caroline.  “Something is always chewing at my affairs but Mrs. Matilda shoos them away for me sometimes still—­even calves when it is positively necessary.  How very industrious you do look!  At times even I sigh for a needle, though I wouldn’t know what to do with it.  There seems to be something in a woman’s soul that nothing but a needle satisfies; morbid craving, that!”

“Phoebe, I want to make something for you.  I feel I must as soon as these petticoats for Little Sister are done.  What shall it be?” and Caroline Darrah beamed upon Phoebe with the warmest of inter-woman glances.  The affection for Phoebe which had possessed the heart of Caroline Darrah had deepened daily and to its demands, Phoebe, for her, had been most unusually responsive.

“At your present rate of stitching I will have a year or two to decide, beautiful,” she answered as she settled down on the broad window-seat near them.  “David Kildare and I have come to lunch, Mrs. Matilda, and the major has sent him over for Andrew.  I hope he brings him, but I doubt it.  I have told Tempie and she says she is glad to have us,” she added as Mrs. Buchanan turned and looked in the direction of the kitchen regions.  They all smiled, for the understanding that existed between Phoebe and Tempie was the subject of continual jest.

“Have you seen the babies to-day?” asked Caroline as she drew a long new thread through the needle.  “Isn’t it lovely the way people are making them presents?  Mr. Capers says the men at the mills are going to give them each a thousand dollar mill bond.”