"Isn't it a fine meal?" Aunt Rose asked everyone. "Got it on the table half an hour early, too!"
But the others were thinking that Monday followed Sunday, and Tuesday followed Monday, and so on for an entire week of sad breakfasts, melancholy lunches, and funereal dinners. In a few minutes the dining room was empty. Upstairs the boarders brooded in their rooms.
Grandma moved slowly, stunned, into her kitchen.
"This," said Grandfather, "has gone far enough!" He went to the foot of the stairs and called up into the dusty sunlight: "Come on down, everyone!"
The boarders murmured, all of them, locked in the dim, comfortable library. Grandfather quietly passed a derby hat. "For the kitty," he said. Then he put his hand heavily on Douglas's shoulder. "Douglas, we have a great mission for you, son. Now listen ..." And he whispered his warm, friendly breath into the boy's ear.
Douglas found Aunt Rose, alone, cutting flowers in the garden the next afternoon.
"Aunt Rose," he said gravely, "why don't we go for a walk right now? I'll show you the butterfly ravine just down that way."
They walked together all around town. Douglas talked swiftly, nervously, not looking at her, listening only to the courthouse clock strike the afternoon hours.
Strolling back under the warm summer elms toward the house, Aunt Rose suddenly gasped and put her hand to her throat.
There, on the bottom of the porch step, was her luggage, neatly packed. On top of one suitcase, fluttering in the summer breeze, was a pink railroad ticket.
The boarders, all ten of them, were seated on the porch stiffly. Grandfather, like a train conductor, a mayor, a good friend, came down the steps solemnly.
"Rose," he said to her, taking her hand and shaking it up and down, "I have something to say to you."
"What is it?" said Aunt Rose.
"Aunt Rose," he said. "Good-bye."
They heard the train chant away into the late afternoon hours. The porch was empty, the luggage gone, Aunt Rose's room unoccupied. Grandfather in the library, groped behind E. A. Poe for a small medicine bottle, smiling.
Grandma came home from a solitary shopping expedition to town.
"Where's Aunt Rose?"
"We said good-bye to her at the station," said Grandfather. "We all wept. She hated to go, but she sent her best love to you and said she would return again in twelve years." Grandfather took out his solid gold watch. "And now I suggest we all repair to the library for a glass of sherry while waiting for Grandma to fix one of her amazing banquets."
Grandma walked off to the back of the house.
Everyone talked and laughed and listened--the boarders, Grandfather, and Douglas, and they heard the quiet sounds in the kitchen. When Grandma rang the bell they herded to the dining room, elbowing their way.
Everyone took a huge bite.
Grandma watched the faces of her boarders. Silently they stared at their plates, their hands in their laps, the food cooling, unchewed, in their cheeks.
"I've lost it!" Grandma said. "I've lost my touch...."
And she began to cry.
She got up and wandered out into her neatly ordered, labeled kitchen, her hands moving futilely before her.
The boarders went to bed hungry.
Douglas heard the courthouse clock chime ten-thirty, eleven, then midnight, heard the boarders stirring in their beds, like a tide moving under the moonlit roof of the vast house. He knew they were all awake, thinking, and sad. After a long time, he sat up in bed. He began to smile at the wall and the mirror. He saw himself grinning as he opened the door and crept downstairs. The parlor was dark and smelled old and alone. He held his breath.
He fumbled into the kitchen and stood waiting a moment.
Then he began to move.
He took the baking powder out of its fine new tin and put it in an old flour sack the way it had always been. He dusted the white flour into an old cookie crock. He removed the sugar from the metal bin marked sugar