Hildegarde rarely spoke of her father. "I've pigeonholed him," she said once when his name was mentioned.
"Do you mean you don't think of him?"
"It hurts me to think of him, and I don't want anything to spoil my happiness with Crispin."
There was a strength in thus shelving the disagreeable which reminded them of her mother.
Olivia, probing a bit, asked, "Don't you miss the luxuries?"
Then Hildegarde voiced a great truth. "Luxuries don't count when people fail you. It is like sailing on a fine ship with a hole in its bottom. You don't care for the fineness—you just want—a raft—"
Aunt Catherine spoke with dry amusement, "I suppose Olivia and I are two planks in the raft?"
"You are two white sails on a lonely sea."
"And Crispin is your rudder?"
"Crispin!" Hildegarde flung a kiss upward from the tips of her fingers. "Crispin is the captain, the crew and the bo'sun, too! Aunt Olivia, do you think I am very silly?"
They did not think her silly. They thought her wonderful, although they did not express it that way. They never used superlatives.
In the mail which Hildegarde had brought was a letter from Sally. Hildegarde, sitting on the edge of the kitchen table, read it to the two aunts, who, each in a red-cushioned rocking chair, listened as if it were a message from a strange country. Never, never, had they lived as Sally was living in a world of high
