ns were gone through hastily. The Middletons felt their
prejudice vanish at sight of her kind, worn, genuine face, and she was
deeply impressed by the minister. Of his wife, she reserved judgment.

She kissed her young relative with more warmth than she had expected to
feel, for there were tears on the girl's white cheeks, and she looked
sweet and sorry and appealing. She was indeed a Pritchard, though not so
typically so as she had anticipated.

The minister mentioned the point at which they had arrived in the
discussion, and for a little they talked all round the matter. Then Miss
Pritchard presented her conclusions.

"Those babes took things into their own hands in great style a year ago,"
she declared. "They got hold of a deck of cards and shuffled them to
suit themselves, not realizing that isn't the way to play the game. They
shouldn't have touched the cards and they shouldn't have shuffled them;
but somehow they happened to make a good deal all round. As the game has
come out, we all like it. We shouldn't, indeed, be willing to go back
and deal out fresh hands. Am I wrong?"

The rejoinder indicated that she was wholly in the right.

"Now, for my part, I'm used to Elsie Moss and I want to keep her, but I
wouldn't take her out of reach of her own kin--at least not for some
time. There's a man in Boston I want her to study with--she's going to
be an opera-singer--and we're to be here at the inn all summer so that we
can get respectively acquainted with our shuffled kith and kin--I want a
chance to know my little Pritchard cousin, too."

It seemed easier to speak beside the point than to the question.
Thereupon the minister suggested that Miss Pritchard should remain
permanently at Enderby. That might well have waited, but Miss Pritchard
declared she had already thought of taking a house in the fall.

"I thought if you insisted upon trading back, we'd all be in sight of one
another that way, even though we elders might be mutually hating each
other," she added.

Whereupon they began to mention particular houses, and would have gone on
indefinitely but for Mrs. Moss. It was she, the outsider, for whom,
whatever the sequel, there would be no place in the plans, who called
them back to the real matter at issue.

"Apparently, then," she said, "you're going to let things remain largely
in the _status quo_. But one difficulty comes to my mind. When all is
said, my Elsie was wholly at fault in all thi