I thought of the flying squirrels and the blue-tailed lizards and the
old toad, and I knew how she felt. And I said so. She looked at me
sharply, and then she laid her hand over mine: "Are you lonely, my
dear?"
I said that I was--a little. Billy had gone in to wait on a customer, so
I dared say it. I told her that nobody had called.
"But why not?" she demanded.
"I think," I said slowly, "it is because we live--over the store."
"I see." And she did see; it was in her blood as well as in the blood of
the rest of them.
Presently she stood up and said that she must go, and it was then that
she noticed the work that was in my basket on the table. She lifted out
a little garment and the red came into her cheeks. "Oh, oh!" she said,
and stood looking at it. When she laid it down, she came around the
table and kissed me. "What a dear you are!" she said, and then she went
away.
William Watters came in very often after that; but he said very little
about Lady Crusoe. He was a faithful old thing, and he had evidently had
instructions. But one morning he brought a fine old Sheffield tray to
Billy and asked him to take his pay out of it, and let Lady Crusoe have
the rest in cash. William Watters didn't call her "Lady Crusoe," he
called her "Miss Lily," which didn't give us the key to the situation in
the least. Billy didn't know how to value the tray, so he asked me. I
knew more than he did, but I wasn't sure. I told him to advance what he
thought was best, and to send it to the city and have it appraised, or
whatever they call it, so he did; and when the check from the antique
shop came it was a big one.
It wasn't long after that that Lady Crusoe called on me. It was a real
call, and she left a card. And she said as she laid it on the table: "As
I told you, I'd rather the rest of the natives didn't know--they haven't
seen me since I was a child, and they think that I am just some stranger
who rents the old place and who wants to be alone."
After she had gone I picked up the card, and what I read there nearly
took my breath away. There are certain names which mean so much that we
get to look upon them as having special significance. The name that was
on Lady Crusoe's card had always stood in my mind for money--oceans of
it. I simply couldn't believe my eyes, and I took it down to Billy.
"Look at that," I said, and laid it before him, "and she has asked us to
supper for next Sunday!"
Well, we couldn't make anything of it. Why was a woman with a name like
that down here with nothing to eat but the things that William Watters
could forage for, and that Billy could supply from his little store, and
that she paid for with Sheffield trays?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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