“I hope we’ll be all together, wherever
we are,” said Cecily gently. “Nothing
can be so very bad then.”
“I’m going to read the Bible all to-morrow
forenoon,” said Peter.
When Aunt Olivia came out to go home the Story Girl
asked her permission to stay all night with Felicity
and Cecily. Aunt Olivia assented lightly, swinging
her hat on her arm and including us all in a friendly
smile. She looked very pretty, with her big
blue eyes and warm-hued golden hair. We loved
Aunt Olivia; but just now we resented her having laughed
at us with Aunt Janet, and we refused to smile back.
“What a sulky, sulky lot of little people,”
said Aunt Olivia, going away across the yard, holding
her pretty dress up from the dewy grass.
Peter resolved to stay all night with us, too, not
troubling himself about anybody’s permission.
When we went to bed it was settling down for a stormy
night, and the rain was streaming wetly on the roof,
as if the world, like Sara Ray, were weeping because
its end was so near. Nobody forgot or hurried
over his prayers that night. We would dearly
have loved to leave the candle burning, but Aunt Janet’s
decree regarding this was as inexorable as any of
Mede and Persia. Out the candle must go; and
we lay there, quaking, with the wild rain streaming
down on the roof above us, and the voices of the storm
wailing through the writhing spruce trees.
Sunday morning broke, dull and gray. The rain
had ceased, but the clouds hung dark and brooding
above a world which, in its windless calm, following
the spent storm-throe, seemed to us to be waiting
“till judgment spoke the doom of fate.”
We were all up early. None of us, it appeared,
had slept well, and some of us not at all. The
Story Girl had been among the latter, and she looked
very pale and wan, with black shadows under her deep-set
eyes. Peter, however, had slept soundly enough
after twelve o’clock.
“When you’ve been stumping out elderberries
all the afternoon it’ll take more than the Judgment
Day to keep you awake all night,” he said.
“But when I woke up this morning it was just
awful. I’d forgot it for a moment, and
then it all came back with a rush, and I was worse
scared than before.”
Cecily was pale but brave. For the first time
in years she had not put her hair up in curlers on
Saturday night. It was brushed and braided with
Puritan simplicity.
“If it’s the Judgment Day I don’t
care whether my hair is curly or not,” she said.
“Well,” said Aunt Janet, when we all descended
to the kitchen, “this is the first time you
young ones have ever all got up without being called,
and that’s a fact.”
At breakfast our appetites were poor. How could
the grown-ups eat as they did? After breakfast
and the necessary chores there was the forenoon to
be lived through. Peter, true to his word, got
out his Bible and began to read from the first chapter
in Genesis.
