Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/15

Rh had spoken. The whirr of her machine had long since ceased. She was basting now.

"I'm sure I'm sorry to trouble anybody," plaintively the invalid began—she had a high-pitched, querulous voice—"but it's long past four."

"I'll go in a minute," said Reba. "I'm nearly at the end of this seam."

She took half a dozen more stitches.

"I don't know what good it does," complainingly the invalid went on, "to buy expensive medicine and then let it stand in the bottle."

Reba fastened her thread nicely, taking three precise little stitches in the same spot, and cutting off her thread close to the cloth with a pair of small scissors. She stuck her needle into a little red-woolen, tomato-shaped pin-cushion on the window-sill, and began folding up her work.

"I can always be put off," pursued her mother petulantly. "Seams are more important than I am, of course!" And still unsuccessful at getting any sympathetic response, she finished tearfully, "It will be a good thing when I'm out of the way, and not bothering anybody any more, I guess."

Even at that Reba made no reply. Her mother had used the same weapon so often before that it had long since lost its sharp edge. She laid aside her work and stood up.

Abruptly from her place in front of the machine Aunt Augusta spoke.

"While you're about it," she commented in a flat tone, "you can see to the furnace too."

"And open the draughts in the stove, as you go through," tucked in Aunt Emma from the window,