feelings changed to pity. "I wonder if Aunt Phoebe isn't ever lonesome,"
she thought. "I don't see how she can help being." A line of her fire
song was ringing in her ears:

"Whose hand above this blaze is lifted
Shall be with magic touch engifted
To warm the hearts of lonely mortals----"

"I wonder if I couldn't bring something else into her life," thought
Hinpoha. "At least, I'm going to try. Aunt Phoebe's never read anything
but religious books all her life. I'd like to read her a corking good
story once." Timidly she essayed it. "Wouldn't you like to have me read
you something else before we begin the next volume?" she asked, when the
third volume conveniently came to an end.

"Do as you like," said Aunt Phoebe, who was profoundly bored. Hinpoha
accordingly brought out "The Count of Monte Cristo" which she had been
reading when the ban went on fiction, and it was not long before Aunt
Phoebe was as excited over the mystery as she was. Romance, long dead in
her heart, began to show signs of coming to life.

Hinpoha, looking for a certain little shawl to put around Aunt Phoebe's
shoulders one afternoon, opened up the big cedar chest that stood in her
room. She had never seen inside of it before. The shawl was not there,
but there were quantities of table and bed linens, all elaborately
embroidered, and whole sets of undergarments, trimmed with the
wonderfully fine crochet work at which Aunt Phoebe was a master hand.
"What can all these things be?" wondered Hinpoha. "Aunt Phoebe certainly
never uses them." A little further down she came upon a filmy white
dress and a veil fastened onto a wreath. Then she knew. This was her
aunt's wedding outfit--the garments she had fashioned in her girlhood in
preparation for the marriage which was destined never to take place. A
week before the wedding the bridegroom-to-be had run away with another
girl. The pathos of Aunt Phoebe's blighted romance struck Hinpoha
"amidships" as Sahwah would have expressed it, and she wept over the
linens in the cedar chest. Poor Aunt Phoebe! No wonder she was sour and
crabbed. Hinpoha forgave her all her crossness and tartness of manner,
and thought of her only with pity. Her romantic nature thrilled at the
thought of the blighted love affair and her aunt became a sort of
heroine in her eyes. She yearned to comfort her and make her happy.

Downstairs Aunt Phoebe sat with a letter in her hand. It was from Aunt
Grace, Hinpoha's mother's sis