She was sitting in her room by a front window writing letters when the girls came rushing up the stairs into the adjoining room. Kitty carried a basket of apples, and Allison some pop-corn and the popper, and presently an appetizing odour began to steal in as the white grains danced over the open fire.
As the girls hovered hungrily around, waiting for the popping to cease, they began a lively discussion which caught Mrs. Walton's attention. She paused, pen in hand, at the mention of two names, Daisy Dale and the Heiress of Dorn. They were familiar names, for only the day before Miss Edith had showed her the pile of books found in Ida's closet, and she was waiting for a suitable time to speak of them to the girls. As she folded her letter and addressed it, she decided she would call them in a little later, when they were through with their apples and their corn, for a quiet little twilight talk. A golden afterglow gleamed above the western tree-tops, and, leaning back in her rocking-chair, she sat watching it fade out, so absorbed in a story she was thinking to tell them that she ceased to hear the girlish chatter in the next room till Lloyd's voice rang out clearly:
"I've made up my mind. I'm nevah going to get married!"
"Then you'll be an old maid," was Kitty's teasing rejoinder, "and people will poke fun at you and your cats and teacups."
"I'll not have any," was the prompt reply. "I nevah expect to have any moah pets of any kind. Whenevah I get to loving anything, something always happens to it. Think of all the pets we have had at Locust. Fritz, and the two Bobs, and Boots, and the gobblah, and the goat, and the parrot, and deah old Hero! Something happened to every one of them. The ponies are the only things left, and the only kind of a pet I'd evah have again. If Tarbaby should die, I'd buy me a hawse, for I don't expect to be the kind of an old maid that sits in a chimney-cawnah with a tabby and a teapot. I expect to dash around the country' on hawseback and have fun even when I'm old and wrinkled and gray. I'll go to college, of co'se, and I'll have interesting people to visit me, so that I'll keep up my interest in the world and not get cranky."
"I'll come and live with you," said Allison. "I'll have a studio and devote my life to making a great artist of myself. We could buy Tanglewood, and make a moat all around the house so that we could pull up the drawbridge when we wanted to be alone or were afraid of burglars."
"Maybe it would be better for me to be an old maid, too," said Betty, musingly. "I'd have more time to write books than if I had a husband and a family to look after. And, besides, while I like to read about lovers and such things in stories, it would make me feel dreadfully foolish to have any man fall on his knees to me and say the things that Lord Rokeby and Guy said to Daisy Dale. I don't even like to write those speeches when I'm in a room by myself. I've tried lots of times, and I've about decided to skip that part in my story. I'll put some stars instead, and begin, 'A year has passed, and Gladys and Eugene,' etc."
"I was going to ask mothah how Papa Jack did it," said Lloyd, "but aftah all that's happened, somehow I'd rathah not say anything about such things to oldah people. Miss McCannister was so horrified when she found we had talked such 'sentimental foolishness,' as she called it. I'll nevah forget the way she screwed up her lips and said, 'It wasn't considahed propah, when I was a child, for little girls to discuss such subjects.' I felt as if I had been caught doing something wicked. It mawtified me dreadfully, and I made up my mind that I'd nevah get to be fond of anybody the way Ida was, for fear I might be mistaken in them as she was."
"Everything seems to be a warning lately," said Betty. "Even the literature lessons this week. If the Lady of Shalott hadn't left her weaving to look out of the window when Sir Lancelot rode by, the curse wouldn't have come upon her."
"There!" cried Allison, scrambling to her feet. "That reminds me that I haven't learned the verses that Miss Edith asked us to memorize for Monday."