"It seems too awful to be ninety-nine and then fall downstairs!" Carrie sobbed. "To be so nearly a hundred. Oh, Kate, if she'd only just lived to be a hundred!"
Kate wept, too, because Aunt Sarah had become a habit, because it was sad to think of ninety-nine years with as little love and laughter in them as there had been in Aunt Sarah's. Kate wept because she was excited and tired, because it made her sad to feel so little sorrow. She could have stopped crying at any moment, but she let her tears trickle on, glad that she catild do this last thing for poor Aunt Sarah.
At first Carrie clung to Kate, repeating that she would never leave her, never! But there was her married brother in California. She hadn't seen him nor his wife for thirty-seven years; she had never seen her nieces, Emma, Caroline, and Anna. And they had asked her to come and make her home with them.
"Think of whole hedges of heliotrope!" Kate said, trying not to sound too eager, speaking from the mixed motives of longing to have Carrie off her hands and wanting something fresh and beautiful to happen to her. Hedges of heliotrope and a bright blue ocean coming into Carrie's life after these years of cheerfully, patiently watching day after day crumble into ash.
"I know—and Will and I were always just devoted. Caroline's named for me"
"You'd be lovely and warm all the time."
"Oh, my! That would be heavenly!"
