"All well, little mother?" he questioned. "Or tired to death? There are festive odors in the house. Has anybody repented and come back again?"
"Not a bit of it!" Sin exclaimed triumphantly, turning round and facing him, all rosy with the loving romp she had been having just a little while before with her babies. "Frank! I've got a pair of Abraham's angels down-stairs! Or Mrs. Abraham's,—if she ever had any. I don't remember that they used to send them to women much, now I think of it, after Eve demeaned herself to entertain the old serpent. Ah! the babies came instead; that was it! Well; there is a couple in the kitchen now, at any rate; and they're toasting and stewing in the most E—lysian manner! That's what you smell."
"Angels? Babies? What terrible ambiguity! What, or who, is stewing, if you please, dear?"
"Muffins. No! oysters. There! you sha'n't know anything about it till you go down to tea. But the millennium's come, and it's begun in our house."
"I knew that, six years ago," said Frank Scherman. "There are exactly nine hundred and ninety-four left of it. I can wait till tea-time with the patience of the saints."
CHAPTER XXVIII.
"LIVING IN."
Desire Ledwith went over to Leicester Place with Bel Bree, when she returned there for the first needful sorting and packing and removing. Bel could not go alone, to risk any meeting; to put herself, voluntarily and unprotected in the way again. Miss Ledwith took a carriage and called for her. In that manner they could bring away nearly all. What remained could be sent for.
Miss Smalley possessed some movables of her own, though the furnishings in her room had been mostly Mrs. Pimminy's. There were some things of her aunt's that Bel would like, and which she had asked leave to bring to Mrs. Scherman's.