down. ‘Don’t touch that willow rocker, William,’ says she. ‘It ain’t been moved since Posie left; and that’s the apron she was hemmin’, layin’ over the arm of it, jist as she flung it. I’m in hopes,’ she goes on, ‘that Posie’ll finish runnin’ out that hem some day.’”
Miss Carrington beckoned peremptorily to a waiter.
“A pint of extra dry,” she ordered, briefly; “and give the check to Goldstein.”
“The sun was shinin’ in the door,” went on the chronicler from Cranberry, “and your ma was settin’ right in it. I asked her if she hadn’t better move back a little. ‘William,’ says she, ‘when I get sot down and lookin’ down the road, I can’t bear to move. Never a day,’ says she, ‘but what I set here every minute that I can spare and watch over them palin’s for Posie. She went away down that road in the night, for we seen her little shoe tracks in the dust, and somethin’ tells me she’ll come back that way ag’in when she’s weary of the world and begins to think about her old mother.’
“When I was comin’ away,” concluded “Bill,” “I pulled this off’n the bush by the front steps. I thought maybe I might see you in the city, and I knowed you’d like somethin’ from the old home.”
He took from his coat pocket a rose—a drooping, yellow, velvet, odorous rose, that hung its head in the foul atmosphere of that tainted rathskeller like
[184]
