Mrs. Duds Sister | Page 2

of each of
these a trim green clothes-tree was planted, all abloom with snowy
fringed napkins that shone dazzling white against the hedge. One of the
squares was a neat little kitchen-garden; parsley was there in plenty,
and other vaguely familiar green things, curly-leaved and spear-pointed.
A warm gust of wind brought mint to his nostrils. A second plot held a
small crab-apple tree covered with pink and orange globes. A great
tortoise-shell cat with two kittens ornamented the third, and in the
middle of the fourth, beside a small wooden table, a woman sat with
her back toward the intruder. On the table were one or two tin boxes
and a yellow earthen dish; in her left hand, raised to the shoulder-level,
was a tall thin bottle, from which an amber fluid dripped in an almost
imperceptibly thin stream; her right arm stirred vigorously. She was a
middle-aged woman with lightly grayed hair--a kind of premonitory
powdering. Over her full skirt of lavender-striped cotton stuff fell a
broad, competent white apron. Except for the thudding of the spoon
against the bowl, and a faint, homely echo of clashing china and tin,
mingled with occasionally raised voices and laughter from some farther
kitchen region, all was utterly, placidly still.
Varian stood chained to the open gate. Something in the calm
sun-bathed picture tugged strongly at his heart. He thought suddenly of
his mother and his Aunt Delia--he had been very fond of Aunt Delia.
And what cookies she used to make! Molasses cookies, brown, moist,
and crumbly, they had sweetened his boyhood.
What was it, that delighted sense of congruity that filled him, every
passing second, with keener familiarity, so strangely tinged with
sorrow and regret? Ah, he had it! He bit his lip as it came clear to him.
His little namesake nephew, dead at eight years old, and dear as only a
dearly loved child can be, had delighted greatly in the Kate Greenaway
pictures that came in "painting-books," with colored prints on alternate
pages and corresponding outlines on the others. Dozens of those books
the boy had cleverly filled in with his little japanned paint-box and
mussy, quill-handled brushes; and the scene before him, the rich tints
of the hedge, the symmetrical little tree brilliant with hundreds of tiny
globes, the big white apron, the lazy yellow cats, and everywhere the

prim rectangular lines so amusingly conventional to accentuate the
likeness, almost choked him with the suddenness of the recognition.
They must have colored that very picture a dozen times, Tommy and
he.
Half unconsciously he rested his arms on the top of the gate and drifted
into revery. He forgot that he was at Wilton Bluffs, one of the greatest
of the country palaces, and lived for a while in a mingled vision of his
boyhood on the old farm and in the land of the Greenaway
painting-books.
Suddenly a door opened into the green.
A housemaid advanced to the table, bearing in both red hands a long
tray covered with a napkin. On the napkin lay, heaped in rich confusion,
a great pile of spicy, smoking brown cookies.
"They're just out o' the oven," she began, but Varian could contain
himself no longer. He could not be deceived: he would have known
those cookies in the Desert of Sahara. He crossed the little plot in three
long steps, and faced the astonished maid.
"I beg your pardon," he said firmly, "but it is very necessary that I
should have one of those cookies! I hope you can spare one?"
She giggled convulsively.
"I--I guess you can, sir," she murmured, laying down the tray and
retreating toward the house door.
Varian faced the older woman, and, with hat still in hand, instinctively
bowed lower; for this was no housekeeper--he was sure of that. Even as
she met his eyes a great flood of pink rushed to her smooth forehead,
and she dropped her lids as she bowed slightly. He reflected
irrelevantly that he had never seen Mrs. Dudley blush in his life.
"You are very welcome to all you wish, I am sure," she said graciously.
"I--I didn't know any one liked them but me. I always have them made

for me--I taught her the rule. I always call them"--she laughed
nervously, and it dawned on him that this woman was really shy and
"talking against time," as they said--"I always call them 'Aunt Delia's
cookies.' They--"
"Aunt Delia's cookies!" he interrupted. "What Aunt Delia?"
"Aunt Delia Parmentre," she returned, a little surprised, evidently, at
this stranger, who, with a straw sailor-hat in one hand and a warm
molasses cooky in the other, stared so intently at her. "She wasn't really
my aunt, of course--"
"But she was mine!" he burst out, "and these are her cookies, and