“I don’t know how many girls Archie Lovell was engaged to,” she now remarked dryly. “I dare say he did n’t himself; and for all I know, he was engaged to all three of those geese that are flying the black flag for him. But I can tell you the girl he really wanted to marry, and she is n’t in black, either.”
The ladies all regarded her with looks of lively curiosity and interrogation; but she rolled the sweet morsel of gossip under her tongue, and evidently had no intention of being hurried.
“Who is it?” Mrs. Cummings demanded at length, in a tone which indicated that no more trifling would be endurable.
Aunt Naomi moistened her lips with an air like that of a cat in contemplation of a plump young sparrow.
“I don’t see who there is that’s any more likely to have been engaged to him than Mattie,” the champion of that young lady asserted combatively.
“He’d no more have married her than he would me,” Aunt Naomi asserted contemptuously.
“Who was it, then?” Mrs. Smith demanded impatiently.
Aunt Naomi looked about on the eager faces, and seemed to feel that interest had been brought up to its culmination point so that it was time to speak.
“Nancy Turner,” she pronounced briefly.
The name was received with varying expressions of face, but few of the ladies had any especial comment to offer in word. Some scorned the idea, and the champions of the three mourners still stood by their guns; but the new theory plainly had in it some force, for the women were all evidently impressed that in this suggestion might lie the real solution to the vagaries of Archie Lovell’s multitudinous wooing. As Mrs. Cummings said, however, Nancy Turner was a girl who kept her own counsel, and if she had indeed been engaged to the missing soldier, nobody would ever be the wiser for it. It was discouraging to the gossips to be confronted with a mystery which they could have so little hope of ever solving, and the talk gradually turned to other topics, this one remaining as available as ever to be taken up whenever conversation might languish.