“Oh, my dear Mrs. Carter, how glad I am to meet you!” she said as she towered over me in a willowy way, and her voice was lovely and cool almost to slimness.  “I am the bearer of so many gracious messages that I am anxious to deliver them safely to you.  Not six weeks ago I left Alfred Bennett in Paris, and really—­really his greetings to you almost amounted to a pile of luggage.  He came down to Cherbourg to see me off, and almost the last thing he said to me was, ’Now, don’t fail to see Mrs. Carter as soon as you get to Hillsboro; and the more you see of her the more you’ll enjoy your visit to Mrs. Pollard.’  Isn’t he the most delightful of men?” She asked me the question, but she had the most wonderful way of seeming to be talking to everybody at one time, so Mrs. Johnson got in the first answer.

“Delightful indeed!  But Alfred Bennett is a man of sense not to marry any of the string of women who I suppose are running after him!” she said.  Miss Clinton looked at her in a mild kind of wonder, but she went on hacking Mr. Johnson’s coat-sleeve with the needle without noticing the glance at all.

“Well, well, dearie, I don’t know about that,” said Aunt Bettie as she fanned and rocked her great, big, darling, fat self in the strong rocking-chair I always kept for her.  “Alfred is not old enough to have proved himself entirely, and from what I hear—­” she paused with the big hearty smile that she always wears when she begins to tease or match-make, and she does them both most of her time.

But at whom do you suppose she looked?  Not me!  Miss Clinton!  That was cold tub number two for that day, and I didn’t react as quickly as I might, but when I did I was in the proper glow all over.  When I revived and saw the lovely pale blush on her face I felt like a cabbage-rose beside a tea-bud.  I was glad Aunt Adeline came in just then so I could go in and tell Julia to bring out the tea and cakes.  When I came from the kitchen I stepped into my room and took out one of Alfred’s letters from the desk drawer and opened it at random, and put my finger down on a line with my eyes shut.  This was what it was—­

“—­and all these years I have walked the world, blindfolded to its loveliness with the blackness that came to me when I found that you—­”

I didn’t read any more, but pushed it back in a hurry and went back to the company comforted in a way, but feeling a little more in sympathy with Mrs. Johnson than I had before Aunt Bettie and her guest from London had interrupted our algebraic demonstration on the man subject.  You can’t always be sure of the right answer to X in any proposition of life; that is, a woman can’t!

And, furthermore, I didn’t like that next hour much, just as a sample of life, for instance.  Aunt Bettie had got her joining-together humour well started, and there, before my face, she made a present of every nice man in Hillsboro to that lovely, distinguished, strange girl who could have slipped through a bucket hoop if she had tried hard.  I had to sit there, listen to the presentations, watch her drink two delicious cups of tea full of sugar and cream, and consume without fear three of Jane’s puffy cakes, while I crumbled mine in secret and set half the cup of tea out of sight behind a fern pot.