“Do you feel any better?” asked Aunt Oldways of Laura, when they came home to the country tea-dinner.

“Better—­how?” asked Laura, in surprise.

“After all that ‘wear’ and stare,” said Aunt Oldways, quietly.

Aunt Oldways might have been astonished, but she was by no means awestruck, evidently; and Aunt Oldways generally spoke her mind.

Somehow, with Laura Shiere, pink was pinker, and ribbons were more rustling than with most people.  Upon some quiet unconscious folks, silk makes no spread, and color little show; with Laura every gleam told, every fibre asserted itself.  It was the live Aurora, bristling and tingling to its farthest electric point.  She did not toss or flaunt, either; she had learned better of Signor Pirotti how to carry herself; but she was in conscious rapport with every thing and stitch she had about her.  Some persons only put clothes on to their bodies; others really seem to contrive to put them on to their souls.

Laura Shiere came up to Homesworth three years later, with something more wonderful than a pink embossed muslin:—­she had a lover.

Mrs. Oferr and her daughters were on their way to the mountains; Laura was to be left with the Oldways.  Grant Ledwith accompanied them all thus far on their way; then he had to go back to Boston.

“I can’t think of anything but that pink sunshade she used to carry round canted all to one side over her shoulder,” said Aunt Oldways, looking after them down the dusty road the morning that he went away.  Laura, in her white dress and her straw hat and her silly little bronze-and-blue-silk slippers printing the roadside gravel, leaning on Grant Ledwith’s arm, seemed only to have gained a fresh, graceful adjunct to set off her own pretty goings and comings with, and to heighten the outside interest of that little point of eternity that she called her life.  Mr. Ledwith was not so much a man who had won a woman, as Laura was a girl who had “got a beau.”

She had sixteen tucked and trimmed white skirts, too, she told Frank; she should have eight more before she was married; people wore ever so many skirts now, at a time.  She had been to a party a little while ago where she wore seven.

There were deep French embroidery bands around some of these white skirts; those were beautiful for morning dresses.  Geraldine Oferr was married last winter; Laura had been her bridesmaid; Gerry had a white brocade from Paris, and a point-lace veil.  She had three dozen of everything, right through.  They had gone to housekeeping up town, in West Sixteenth Street.  Frank would have to come to New York next winter, or in the spring, to be her bridesmaid; then she would see; then—­who knew!

Frank was only sixteen, and she lived away up here in Homesworth among the hills; she had not “seen,” but she had her own little secret, for all that; something she neither told nor thought, yet which was there; and it came across her with a queer little thrill from the hidden, unlooked-at place below thought, that “Who” didn’t know.