"Oh!" said Lucindy, a faint shade of disappointment clouding her face. "Well, no matter! I guess they've got one down to the Mardens'. Jane, should you just as soon come round this afternoon, and look over some bunnit trimmin's with me? I took two kinds of flowers home from Miss West's, and I can't for my life tell which to have."
"Ain't you goin' to wear black?" Mrs. Wilson spoke now in double italics.
"Oh, no! I don't feel called on to do that. I always liked bright colors, and I don't know's 'twould be real honest in me to put on mournin' when I didn't feel it."
"'Honor thy father'—" began Jane, in spite of her husband's warning hand; but Lucindy interrupted her, with some perplexity.
"I have, Jane, I have! I honored father all my life, just as much as ever I could. I done everything he ever told me, little and big! No, though, there's one thing I never fell in with. I did cheat him once. I don't know but I'm sorry for that, now it's all past and gone!"
Her cousin had been drumming absently on the window-sill, but he looked up with awakened interest. Mrs. Wilson, too, felt a wholesale curiosity, and she, at least, saw no reason for curbing it.
"What was it, Lucindy?" she asked. "The old hunks!" she repeated to herself, like an anathema.
Lucindy began her confession, with eyes down-dropped and a faltering voice.
"Father wanted I should have my hair done up tight and firm. So I pretended I done the best I could with it. I told him these curls round my face and down in my neck was too short, and I couldn't pin 'em up. But they wa'n't curls, and they wouldn't ha' been short if I hadn't cut 'em. For every night, and sometimes twice a day, I curled 'em on a pipe-stem."
"Ain't them curls nat'ral, Lucindy?" cried Mrs. Wilson. "Have you been fixin' 'em to blow round your face that way, all these years?"