others must hear it. She bent over the roses. "How perfectly lovely!"
she said.

Aunt Maria took up the box and lifted the flowers out carefully.
"There isn't any card," she said. "I wonder who sent them?" All at
once a surmise seized her that Professor Lane, who was said to be
regaining his health in Colorado, had sent an order to the Westbridge
florist for these flowers. Simultaneously the thought came to Evelyn,
but Eunice, who was in the room, looked bewildered. When Maria
carried the roses out to put them in water, she turned to her
sister-in-law. "Who on earth do you suppose sent them?" she whispered.

Aunt Maria looked at her, and formed Professor Lane's name
noiselessly with her lips, giving her at the same time a knowing nod.
Eunice looked at Evelyn, who also nodded, although with a somewhat
disturbed expression. She still did not feel quite reconciled to the
idea of her sister's loving Professor Lane.

"I didn't know," said Eunice.

"Nobody knows; but we sort of surmise," said Aunt Maria.

"Why, he's old enough to be her father," Eunice said.

"What of that, if he only gets cured of his consumption?" said Aunt
Maria. She herself felt disgusted, but she had a pleasure in
concealing her disgust from her sister-in-law. "Lots of girls would
jump at him," said she.

"I wouldn't have when I was a girl," Eunice remarked, in a mildly
reminiscent manner.

"You don't know what you would have done if you hadn't got my
brother," said Aunt Maria.

"I would never have married anybody," Eunice replied, with a fervent,
faithful look. As she spoke, she seemed to see Henry Stillman as he
had been, when a young man and courting her, and she felt as if a
king had passed her field of memory to the exclusion of all others.

"Maybe you wouldn't have," said her sister-in-law, "but nowadays
girls have to take what they can get. Men ain't so anxious to marry.
When a man had to have all his shirts and dickeys made he was
helpless, to say nothing of his pants, but nowadays he can get
everything ready-made, and it doesn't make so much difference to him
whether he gets married or not. He can have a good deal more for
himself, if he's an old bachelor."

"Maybe you are right," said Eunice, "but I know when I was a girl
Maria's age I wouldn't have let an old man like Professor Lane, with
the consumption, too, tie my shoes. Do you suppose he really sent her
the roses?"

"Who else could have sent them?"

"They must have cost