Page:The Keeper of the Bees.pdf/342

 hadn’t but one near relative on earth, her twin brother Donald, and from the time their father and my husband were drowned at sea at the same time, I’ve had them in my home until they were far enough along with their education to get work and go out for themselves. They’d all been friends. Don and Lolly had been better friends than I’d wanted them to be. Don didn’t have Molly’s backbone; he didn’t have her view of life. I thought he was kind of shiftless and weak, and for a few years we all had a fight to keep him from getting into a lot of things that he shouldn’t have gotten into. It was always Lolly that could hold him and manage him, if anybody could. I was kind of glad of it when he got work and went away, but having Molly at her school work in the city left this house so emptied out and lonesome that my girl just picked up and went, too, and in my heart I knew that Molly planned it, and I didn’t like it.

“Then, like a clap out of a clear sky, Molly called for me to come quick, that she was in trouble, and when I got to her I found her worse broken up than I’d ever thought she could be. Word had come that Don was dead. They had got him work, a fine place, in the big power plant at San Joaquin, and he seemed to like it and was doing fine. I don’t know enough about electricity to know how the thing that happened could happen, but he did something wrong, and as quick as electricity can do it, he was gone. We sent for Lolly but she didn’t come. She sent word she felt so bad she was sick in bed and she couldn’t, and I could see how she would feel bad enough to make her sick