Then I laughed.  I couldn’t help it.  And Alice was hurt, for some reason, and got up and held her head high and went into the house.  And Aunt Elizabeth came up the drive, and that is how she found me laughing.  She had on a lovely light-blue linen.  Nobody wears such delicate shades as Aunt Elizabeth.  I remember, one day, when she came in an embroidered pongee over Nile-green, father groaned, and grandmother said:  “What is it, Cyrus?  Have you got a pain?” “Yes,” said father, “the pain I always have when I see sheep dressed lamb fashion.”  Grandmother laughed, but mother said:  “Sh!” Mother’s dear.

This time Aunt Elizabeth had on a great picture-hat with light-blue ostrich plumes; it was almost the shape of her lavender one that Charles Edward said made her look like a coster’s bride.  When she bent over me and put both arms around me the plumes tickled my ear.  I think that was why I was so cross.  I wriggled away from her and said:  “Don’t!”

Aunt Elizabeth spoke quite solemnly.  “Dear child!” she said, “you are broken, indeed.”

And I began to feel again just as I had been feeling, as if I were in a show for everybody to look at, and I found I was shaking all over, and was angry with myself because of it.  She had drawn up a chair, and she held both my hands.

“Peggy,” said she, “haven’t you been to the hospital to see that poor dear boy?”

I didn’t have to answer, for there was a whirl on the gravel, and Billy, on his bicycle, came riding up with the mail.  He threw himself off his wheel and plunged up the steps as he always does, pretended to tickle his nose with Aunt Elizabeth’s feathers as he passed behind her, and whispered to me:  “Shoot the hat!” But he had heard Aunt Elizabeth asking if I were not going to see that poor dear boy, and he said, as if he couldn’t help it: 

“Huh!  I guess if she did she wouldn’t get in.  His mother’s walking up and down front of the hospital when she ain’t with him, and she’s got a hook nose and white hair done up over a roll and an eye-glass on a stick, and I guess there won’t be no nimps and shepherdesses get by her.”

Aunt Elizabeth stood and thought for a minute, and her eyes looked as they do when she stares through you and doesn’t see you at all.  Alice asked Charles Edward once if he thought she was sorrowing o’er the past when she had that look, and he said:  “Bless you, chile, no more than a gentle industrious spider.  She’s spinning a web.”  But in a minute mother had stepped out on the piazza, and I felt as if she had come to my rescue.  It was the way she used to come when I broke my doll or tore my skirt.  But we didn’t look at each other, mother and I. We didn’t mean Aunt Elizabeth should see there was anything to rescue me from.  Aunt Elizabeth turned to mother, and seemed to pounce upon her.

“Ada,” said she, “has my engagement been announced?”

“Not to my knowledge,” said mother.  She spoke with a great deal of dignity.  “I understood that the name of the gentleman had been withheld.”