"Oh, you mean Sophia Pease--dear! dear!" she wiped her eye glasses tremblingly, "She's been out to the Baptist Home for the Aged this long whiles. Her eyes went back on her--a nice sewer, as nice a sewer as we ever had--dear, dear! I don't know when anybody asked me about Sophia Pease--she made them dolls you was just mentioning--" she motioned toward the disconsolate string toy--"dear, dear! she made them even after she couldn't see for regular sewing--" "Now can't you remember me?" reiterated Felicia pleadingly. The Disagreeable Walnut shook her head. "Can't say as I do--" "But I am Felice--the little girl who came with Mademoiselle D'Ormy to get Miss Pease--can't you see that I am?" The old woman's tittering laugh of denial made Felicia want to shake her. "That child--why you hain't she--she wouldn't be the matter of half your age--you must be thirty-five or forty, hain't ye? She grew up and run away like the rest of her women folks--" she giggled sardonically, "Was a young limb, she was, I used to hear her whistling at them choir boys next door--a young limb--all the girls in that family was man- chasers--the mother run off with the rector's son--younger'n she was-- by a good two years I should say, she must ha' been thirty if she was a minute--but pretty--prettier n' her mother--ever see the mother, Miss Trenton--Miss Montrose that was?" "Did you?" breathed Felicia. "Oh, did you see Grandy's Louisa?" "Did I ever see her?" the Disagreeable Walnut leaned her sharp elbows on the show case. "I see her when she was a bride--I'd just took charge here then--she was a high-stepper! The Major hadn't a penny when she married him but she had all the Montrose money and she got him--some say as she told him if he'd marry her she'd live on what he earned--but I guess he couldn't have earned the matter of her shoe strings--not the way she dressed--she was stylish and tasty in her dress--and then she eloped--with that lawyer fellow--some says she didn't elope with him, but she went off for some French property her mother had left her--but I dunno--she was an awful high-stepper. All I know is that after she was dead and the Major brought Miss Octavia home--" "Did you see Maman? Did you?" Felicia could hardly breath, "Did you see Octavia--wasn't she sweet? Wasn't she darling--didn't you love her, love, love her?" "Too high-stepping!" sniffed the old woman, "Whole lot of 'em was too high-stepping for me--never liked any of 'em--" "She didn't step at all--" Felicia's anger was rising, "She just stayed in her bed and stayed in her bed--how dare you say you--oh! oh!" Color burned in her pale cheeks, "I won't have you say such things--"