Miss Minerva's bed time was half after nine o'clock, summer or
winter. She had hardly varied a second in the years that had
elapsed since the runaway marriage of her only relative, the
young sister whose child had now come to live with her. But on
the night of Billy's arrival the stern, narrow woman sat for
hours in her rocking chair, her mind busy with thoughts of that
pretty young sister, dead since the boy's birth.
And now the wild, reckless, dissipated brother-in-law was dead,
too, and the child had been sent to her; to the aunt who did not
want him, who did not care for children, who had never forgiven
her sister her unfortunate marriage. "If he had only been a
girl," she sighed. What she believed to be a happy thought
entered her brain.
"I shall rear him," she promised herself, "just as if he were a
little girl; then he will be both a pleasure and a comfort to me,
and a companion for my loneliness."
Miss Minerva was strictly methodical; she worked ever by the
clock, so many hours for this, so many minutes for that.
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