But her mother was not listening now; it had been a flash merely of the old self. Mary Ann looked around the room until she found Jane's lap-board with a pile of black sewing on it. She gathered up the carefully pressed pieces and poked them roughly in between a large clothes cupboard and the wall. "There!" she said to herself, "it will be a while before they find that, and when they do they can call it Mary Ann's flighty way of redding up a room." She heard her sisters whispering in the hall and went out to them. Selina was tying her bonnet-strings. "I'm going home to do a lot of cooking," she said in an important undertone. "John's wrote to Ma's relatives in Iowa, and some of them's sure to come." Mary Ann looked into the wrinkled face; the past weeks had added new lines of genuine grief to it, yet she could not help seeing that Selina found some strange pleasure in all these incidents of a last illness. The words she had meant to say seemed futile. She was turning to go into her mother's room again when an idea came to her. "Don't go yet," she said. "I want to show you two something." She went into her bedroom and returned in a few minutes with the crimson dress over her arm. "I was getting it fitted when the news of Ma's sickness came, and I just put a waterproof over it. The seams have got a little ravelled. I thought maybe you two would help me top-sew them." "Mary Ann----!" "You're so much cleverer than me with the needle. I was having it made for--for--" Mary Ann could not trust her voice to tell what she had been having it made for--"for an occasion. It won't be needed now as soon as I expected, but you know, Selina'n'Jane, you always say yourselves there's nothing like taking time by the forelock." "Mary Ann----" "A few hours would finish it up if we all got at it. Oh, there's Ma coughing. I must run and get the pail of water and hot brick to steam up the room." She threw the dress into her sister's hands and was gone. They stood looking at each other across it. "_Poor_ Mary Ann!" "She talked about an occasion. I don't know more'n one kind of occasion people get dresses like this for. Can she mean----?" "At her age? Nonsense!" "Dr. Corbett appears to think a pile of her. He's a widower----" "Now you speak of it, Selina, he does look at her in an admiring sort of way. If there was anything of that kind in prospect--and of course she'd lay off black sooner----" The sun came out and streamed through the high window upon the dress in their hands. It was like a drink of wine to look at it. "There's no denying it's a handsome thing," Jane said. "It does seem a pity to have the edges ravel. We might finish it, anyway, and sew it up in a bag with camphor." Through the gray languor that overlay Mrs. Colquhoun's consciousness, glints of crimson began to find their way. Now the spot of color was disappearing under Mary Ann's white apron; now it was in Jane's stained hands; now it was passing from Jane to Selina.