"What I say." And in her incalculable frame of mind Estelle again was
laughing. "Oh, I don't know which to do, whether to laugh or cry!" she
explained, with eyes bright at once from laughter and from tears. "One
moment I laugh, next moment I cry. I feel as if I were walking in my
sleep. I guess what I need is a nerve-pill."

"You say that Aurora has gone away. Where?"

"Where Gerald pleases, I guess. She's gone with him."

"With Gerald? Now, my dear friend, please explain. You laugh, you cry.
You say Aurora has gone away with Gerald. Please collect yourself and
tell me what it means. 'Gone away with Gerald.' How do you mean gone
away with him?"

"I mean they have eloped, or as good as."

"No, no; people don't elope when there is neither an inconvenient
husband, nor unamenable parents, nor any possible reason why they should
not have each other if they wish to."

"I wonder what you would call it, then. As late as twelve o'clock last
night I didn't know a thing about it, and this morning early they left
together in a carriage, with her trunk strapped on the back."

Leslie lifted her hands to her temples and pressed them as if to keep
her head from a dangerous expansion with the size of the new idea that
must find a home there.

"So it was in earnest!" she said aloud, yet as if speaking to herself.
"Mother has won her bet, and I have lost. Well,"--she tossed her head
and faced Estelle,--"I am glad of it. We knew, of course, that there was
something, and we felt that nothing nicer could happen than that they
should make a match of it. Mother prophesied they would. But I did not
believe it. I was afraid of Gerald--that disposition in him to consider
too finely, to halt on the brink, that negative, renunciatory way he has
settled into. I thought the thing would end in mere philandering. I am
glad"--she threw the weight of conviction on the word,--"glad it hasn't!
I don't see, my dear Estelle, what you can find to cry about."

"Is that the way it strikes you?"

"My dear, I couldn't say which I thought the luckier, Gerald to get
Aurora, or Aurora to get Gerald."

"You surprise me. To me it seems just about the riskiest combination
that could be imagined. I have felt it all along. Those two have no more
in common, I have said, than a bird and a fish."

"Nonsense, my dear girl! Nonsense!"

"I have heard him get so impatient with her because simply she didn't
pronounce a word right. I've seen him so annoyed he ne