With an elegant gesture she received the basket from Noble Dill and took the handle over her ample forearm.  “Hum!” she said.  “Thishere ole basket kine o’ heavy, too.  I wunner whut-all she is got in her!” And she groped within the basket, beneath the newspaper.

Now, it was the breath of Kitty Silver’s life to linger, when she could, in a high atmosphere; and she was a powerful gossip, exorbitantly interested in her young mistress’s affairs and all callers.  Therefore it was beyond her not to seize upon any excuse that might detain her for any time whatever in her present surroundings.

“Pusserve jugs,” she said.  “Pusserve or pickle.  Cain’t tell which.”

“You can in the kitchen,” Julia said, with pointed suggestion.  “Of course you can’t in the dark.”

But still Mrs. Silver snatched at the fleeting moment and did not go.  “Tell by smellin’ ’em,” she murmured, seemingly to herself.

With ease she unscrewed the top of one of the jars; then held the open jar to her nose.  “Don’t smell to me exackly like no pusserves,” she said.  “Nor yit like no pickles.  Don’t smell to me——­” She hesitated, sniffed the jar again, and then inquired in a voice quickly grown anxious:  “Whut is all thishere in thishere jug?  Seem like to me——­”

But here she interrupted herself to utter a muffled exclamation, not coherent.  Instantly she added some words suitable to religious observances, but in a voice of passion.  At the same time, with a fine gesture, she hurled the jar and the basket from her, and both came in contact with the wall, not far away, with a sound of breakage.

“Why, what——­” Julia began.  “Kitty Silver, are you crazy?”

But Kitty Silver was moving hurriedly toward the open front door, where appeared, at that moment, Mr. Atwater in his most irascible state of peculiarity.

He began:  “What was that heathenish——­”

Shouting, Mrs. Silver jostled by him, and, though she disappeared into the house, a trail of calamitous uproar marked her passage to the kitchen.

“What thing has happened?” Mr. Atwater demanded.  “Is she——?”

His daughter interrupted him.

“Oh!” was all she said, and sped by him like a bit of blown thistledown, into the house.  He grasped at her as she passed him; then suddenly he made other gestures, and, like Kitty Silver, used Jacobean phrases.  But now there were no auditors, for Noble Dill and Newland Sanders, after thoughtlessly following a mutual and natural impulse to step over and examine the fallen basket, had both gone out to the street, where they lingered a while, then decided to go home.