To _who_?"

"'To whom,' Florence," her mother suggested primly.

"Mamma!" the daughter cried. "Who's Aunt Julia engaged to get married
to? Noble Dill?"

"Good gracious, _no_!" Mrs. Atwater exclaimed. "What an absurd idea!
It's to a young man in the place she's visiting--a stranger to all of
us. Julia only met him a few weeks ago." Here she forgot Florence, and
turned again to her husband, wearing her former expression of
experienced foreboding.

"It's just as I said. It's exactly like Julia to do such a reckless
thing!"

"But as we don't know anything at all about the young man," he
remonstrated, "how do you know it's reckless?"

"How do you know he's young?" Mrs. Atwater retorted crisply. "All in the
world she said about him was that he's a lawyer. He may be a widower,
for all we know, or divorced, with seven or eight children."

"Oh, no, Mollie!"

"Why, he _might_!" she insisted. "For all we know, he may be a widower
for the third or fourth _time_, or divorced, with any _number_ of
children! If such a person proposed to Julia, you know yourself she'd
hate to be disappointing!"

Her husband laughed. "I don't think she'd go so far as to actually
accept 'such a person' and write home to announce her engagement to the
family. I suppose most of her swains here have been in the habit of
proposing to her just as frequently as she was unable to prevent them
from going that far; and while I don't think she's been as discouraging
with them as she might have been, she's never really accepted any of
'em. She's never been engaged before."

"No," Mrs. Atwater admitted. "Not to this extent! She's never quite
announced it to the family before, that is."

"Yes; I'd hate to have Julia's job when she comes back!" Julia's brother
admitted ruefully.

"What job?"

"Breaking it to her admirers."

"Oh, _she_ isn't going to do that!"

"She'll have to, now," he said. "She'll either have to write the news to
'em, or else tell 'em, face to face, when she comes home."

"She won't do either."

"Why, how could she get out of it?"

His wife smiled pityingly. "She hasn't set a time for coming home, has
she? Don't you know enough of Julia's ways to see she'll never in the
world stand up to the music? She writes that all the family can be told,
because she knows the news will leak out, here and there, in confidence,
little by little, so by the time she gets home they'll all have been
through their first spasms, and after that s