e is Mrs. Uncle Martin?"

Rather startled, I said that I didn't know,--that there had never been
any Mrs. Uncle Martin.

"Why not?" persisted Ian, an answer that is simply an acknowledgment of
ignorance never being accepted by a child. Before I could think Richard
chirped out: "But Aunt Lavinia hasn't any Mr. for her card neiver, and
Martha, she said the other day that there was a Mr. and a Mrs. for
everybody, only sometimes they couldn't find each other for ever so long.
She told that to Effie, and I heard her."

A short pause, and then Ian jumped up, clapping his hands with joy, as
the solution of the problem flashed across him.

"I know what's happened, Barbara; maybe Uncle Martin's Mrs. and Aunt
Lavinia's Mr. has gone and got lost together, and some day they'll find
it out and bring each ovver back! Do you think they will, so we can have
some more weddings and pink ice cream, and couldn't we hurry up and help
find them? I guess we better print him some Mrs. cards so as in case."

I had drifted into gardening work on paper again, and I believe I said
that he had better ask Uncle Martin what he thought about the matter, and
at that moment the bell rang for luncheon.

The ringing of bells for meals in this house is what Lavinia Dorman
calls "a relic of barbarism," that she greatly deplores; but as I tell
her, our family gathers from so many points of the compass that if the
maid announced the meals, she would have to be gifted with the instinct
of a chaser of strayed freight cars.

Ian's queries have brought up a subject that has deluded and eluded my
hopes all summer, and has finally ended in the people that I hoped would
drift through the doorway of one of my most substantial air castles
refusing so to do, or else being too blind to see the open door.

Martin and Lavinia are the best possible friends, have been constantly in
each other's society, see from nearly the same point of view, and both
agree and disagree upon the same subjects, but they have not settled the
question of loneliness of living as I hoped, by making the companionship
permanent, _via_ matrimony.

Of course, I did not expect them to fall in love exactly as Evan and I or
Horace and Sylvia did--that belongs to spring and summer; still, I
thought that when they started worm-hunting together, and played checkers
every evening, that they were beginning to find each other mutually
indispensable, at least.

But no. Martin stored away his papers