to mother. Talk to her all you want to. Mother has the making of
a woman in her. If mother'd been a celibate, she'd have been, also, a
peach."

"But I don't want to talk," said I. "I don't want to talk to anybody."

"Good for you," said Charles Edward. "Now I'll run along."

I sat there on the piazza watching him, thinking he'd been awfully good
to me, and feeling less bruised, somehow, than I do when the rest of the
family advise me--except mother! And I saw him stop, turn round as if he
were coming back, and then settle himself and plant his feet wide apart,
as he does when the family question him about business. Then I saw
somebody in light blue through the trees, and I knew it was Aunt
Elizabeth. Alice was down in the hammock reading and eating cookies, and
she saw her, too. Alice threw the book away and got her long legs out
of the hammock and ran. I thought she was coming into the house to hide
from Aunt Elizabeth. That's what we all do the first minute, and then
we recover ourselves and go down and meet her. But Alice dropped on her
knees by my chair and threw her arms round me.

"Forgive, Peggy," she moaned. "Oh, forgive!"

I saw she had on my fraternity pin, and I thought she meant that. So I
said, "You can wear it today"; but she only hugged me the tighter and
ran on in a rigmarole I didn't understand.

"She's coming, and she'll get it out of Lorraine, and they'll all be
down on us."

Charles Edward and Aunt Elizabeth stood talking together, and just then
I saw her put her hand on his shoulder.

"She's trying to come round him," said Alice.

I began to see she was really in earnest now. "He's squirming. Oh,
Peggy, maybe she's found it out some way, and she's telling him, and
they'll tell you, and you'll think I am false as hell!"

I knew she didn't mean anything by that word, because whenever she says
such things they're always quotations. She began to cry real tears.

"It was Billy put it into my head," said she, "and Lorraine put it
into his. Lorraine wanted him to write out exactly what he knew, and he
didn't know anything except about the telegram and how the letter got
wuzzled, and I told him I'd help him write it as it ought to be 'if life
were a banquet and beauty were wine'; but I told him we must make him
say in it how he'd got to conceal it from me, or they'd think we got it
up together. So I wrote it," said Alice, "and Billy copied it."

Perhaps I wasn't nice to the child, for I couldn