d.

"Oh, Aunt 'Liza!..." A belated discretion came to her aid before she
finished.

Miss Eliza frowned again. Her lips drew ominously down, and reprimand
of some sort was plainly to be detected hovering there, but, for some
obscure reason, she also changed her mind.

"Your Aunt 'Titia," she said, rather mildly, and thus apparently
shifting all responsibility for any evil, which might ensue from this
step to Miss Letitia's plumper shoulders, "your Aunt 'Titia has decided
that so long as this is nearly August, there's no earthly use in your
going to visit them until fall. So I'm going to write your father that.
He may not like it, because he wants you right away, his letter says.
But it would be downright foolishness to get you more summer clothes
this late in the season; and you haven't near enough now, nor the right
kind, to visit in a city. It's just like him, for all the world, this
whole affair. Letting you alone for this long, and then all of a sudden
wanting you to be bundled right off to him! You'll be needing winter
clothes in a month or two," she finished decidedly, "so you're going in
the fall." Then she added, much more to herself, however, than to
Arethusa, "But I must say, I strongly doubt the wisdom of your going at
all."

She settled back in her chair with the air of one having said her say,
but leaving her niece with a feeling strongly resembling
dissatisfaction.

Miss Eliza had simply flung these few facts at her without any
elaboration; sketched in the bare outlines to what, viewed by Arethusa,
a whole volume might be added without doing anywhere near full justice
to the Subject. There was that matter of the "new wife," especially.
One's only father does not get married every day, and to dismiss the
lady of his choice by simply stating her existence does not gratify a
thousandth part of natural curiosity. Her father, she knew, had written
more than just the simple fact of his marriage. If he had done just
that; then it was certainly not her father who had written the letter.

Miss Eliza had not told her when ... or where ... or ...

Arethusa gazed at her aunt, clasping and unclasping her hands
helplessly; her lips parted for speech, but no words came, for so many
words trembled there, they literally dammed one another up.

"I ... Did Father ..." she managed to gasp, finally.

But Miss Eliza seemed to read through this inadequacy of expression
some of that chaos of thought which whirled round