P.S.  If you can keep Bettina from getting married while I’m away
  I’ll be very glad.  She believes a woman should marry and rear a
  large family!

  E.

We were sitting on the porch of the cottage at Lake Penzance when I received the letter, and I read it aloud.  “Humph!” said Tish, putting down the stocking she was knitting and looking over her spectacles at me—­“Likes her Presbyterianism pure and believes in a large family!  How old is she?  Forty?”

“Eighteen or twenty,” I replied, looking at the letter.  “I’m not anxious to go.  She’ll probably find me frivolous.”

Tish put on her spectacles and took the letter.  “I think it’s your duty, Lizzie,” she said when she’d read it through.  “But that young woman needs handling.  We’d better all go.  We can motor over in half a day.”

That was how it happened that Bettina Bailey, sitting on Eliza Bailey’s front piazza, decked out in chintz cushions,—­the piazza, of course,—­saw a dusty machine come up the drive and stop with a flourish at the steps.  And from it alight, not one chaperon, but three.

After her first gasp Bettina was game.  She was a pretty girl in a white dress and bore no traces in her face of any stern religious proclivities.

“I didn’t know—­” she said, staring from one to the other of us.  “Mother said—­that is—­won’t you go right upstairs and have some tea and lie down?” She had hardly taken her eyes from Tish, who had lifted the engine hood and was poking at the carbureter with a hairpin.

“No, thanks,” said Tish briskly.  “I’ll just go around to the garage and oil up while I’m dirty.  I’ve got a short circuit somewhere.  Aggie, you and Lizzie get the trunk off.”

Bettina stood by while we unbuckled and lifted down our traveling trunk.  She did not speak a word, beyond asking if we wouldn’t wait until the gardener came.  On Tish’s saying she had no time to wait, because she wanted to put kerosene in the cylinders before the engine cooled, Bettina lapsed into silence and stood by watching us.

Bettina took us upstairs.  She had put Drummond’s “Natural Law in the Spiritual World” on my table and a couch was ready with pillows and a knitted slumber robe.  Very gently she helped us out of our veils and dusters and closed the windows for fear of drafts.

“Dear mother is so reckless of drafts,” she remarked.  “Are you sure you won’t have tea?”

“We had some blackberry cordial with us,” Aggie said, “and we all had a little on the way.  We had to change a tire and it made us thirsty.”

“Change a tire!”

Aggie had taken off her bonnet and was pinning on the small lace cap she wears, away from home, to hide where her hair is growing thin.  In her cap Aggie is a sweet-faced woman of almost fifty, rather ethereal.  She pinned on her cap and pulled her crimps down over her forehead.

“Yes,” she observed.  “A bridge went down with us and one of the nails spoiled a new tire.  I told Miss Carberry the bridge was unsafe, but she thought, by taking it very fast—­”