'll get even with him," she said, stealing on tiptoe down the
hall. "Just you watch!"

Split, her nose in the crack of the door, watched. The Avalanche had
finished his first verse and begun the second, when Sissy appeared in
the parlor, very modest and retiring, walking behind chairs and effacing
herself with an ostentation that could not but attract all eyes. She
stopped at Miss Madigan's chair, asked a question,--which Split knew
well was utterly irrelevant and immaterial,--and received an answer in
Aunt Anne's company manner: a compound of sweetness and flustered
inattention which no one could mimic better than Sissy herself.

Then she withdrew, slowly and by a tortuous route which brought her just
beside him at the moment Westlake stopped singing. Without a word, yet
with a gracious instinct for the momentary confusion in which the
performer found himself, his seat having been taken while he sang,
Cecilia pulled out another from the wall and moved it slightly toward
him.

The little attention was offered so naturally, with such engaging
demureness, that Mrs. Pemberton--whom the social amenities in children
ever delighted--almost loved Sissy Madigan at that moment. So, by the
way, did Split, out in the hall, her eye at the crack of the door, her
feet lifting alternately with anticipative rapture. For it was the
Versailles _fauteuil_ that Sissy had so sweetly selected for old
Westlake. And when the big fellow came down to earth with a crash,
rising red and confused from the debris, Sissy was already out in the
hall. She arrived at the crack in time to see Kate stuff her
handkerchief into her mouth and hurry to the window, her shoulders
shaking, while Miss Madigan flew to the rescue.

It took a recitation in Italian by Mrs. Forrest to rob Sissy Madigan,
judge and executioner, of her complacency after this. Then Aunt Anne
recited "The Bairnies Cuddle Doon" charmingly, as she always did, but
most Hibernianly, with that clean accent that makes Irish-English the
prettiest tongue in the world. After which she received with smiling
complacency the compliments of Mrs. Forrest, who told her that an ideal
mother had been lost to the world in her.

Outside, two cynics listened with a bored air. They felt that they
required a stimulant after this, so they made a hurried visit to the
dining-room, thereby escaping Mr. Garvan's reading of "Father Phil's
Collection." But when Henrietta Bryne-Stivers delivered "Blow, Bugle,
Blo