"Stop?" she laughed; but she knew she meant keep on. With a sigh
she burrowed a little deeper in his neck. "Then I'll ask Aunt
Olivia first," she said.

She went back to her tucking. Only once more did she mention
Rebecca Mary. The once was after she had come downstairs from
tucking the children into bed. She stood in the doorway with the
look in her face that mothers have after doing things like that.
The minister loved that look.

"Robert, nights when I kiss the children--you knew when you married
me that I was foolish--I kiss little lone Rebecca Mary, too. I began
the day Thomas Jefferson died--I went to the Rebecca-Mary-est
window and threw her a kiss. I went tonight. Don't say a word;
you knew when you married me."

Aunt Olivia received the resplendent doll in silence. Plummer
honesty and Plummer politeness were at variance. Plummer politeness said: "Thank her. For goodness' sake, aren't you going to thank
the minister's wife?" But Plummer honesty, grim and yieldless,
said, "You can't thank her, because you're not thankful." So Aunt
Olivia sat silent, with her resplendent doll across her knees.

"For Rebecca Mary," the minister's wife was saying, in rather a
halting way. "I dressed it for her. I thought perhaps she never--"

"She never," said Aunt Olivia, briefly. Strange that at that particular
instant she should remember a trifling incident in the child's
far-off childhood. The incident had to do with a little, white
nightgown rolled tightly and pinned together. She had found Rebecca
Mary in her little waist and petticoat cuddling it in bed.