Over the coffee in the library, by the soft light of the candles, Aunt Eunice at last began in her turn to tell what she had been doing. She had been to tea yesterday at the Holdens. She had attended a meeting of the Sewing Guild that afternoon.
“And last evening,” she ended mildly, “I had Martha Conway here for a good long talk.”
“Oh!” said Penelope, with a queer smile. “While the cat’s away, Mother? Well—how’s that niece of hers?”
Aunt Eunice stirred her coffee attentively.
“Little Caroline’s mother seems to have been an exceptionally fine woman,” she said at length. “One could see that from the child’s pretty ways. Quite gifted musically, too. There are no near relatives on the mother’s side. On the father’s side Martha is the child’s nearest of kin, and her guardian. Martha has all she can do to provide for her own children, and the two babies she’s already taken. She’s a good woman if ever there was one! She’ll do the best she can for Caroline, but she wouldn’t stand in the child’s light, and indeed I think she’d be relieved if some one else——”
Penelope laughed outright, and there was something very like relief in her laughter.
“You blessed old schemer!” she said. “Why don’t you do what you’ve been pining to do ever since the little girl went out of this house? Have her here to stay—indefinitely.”
Aunt Eunice smiled, but she shook her head.
“Martha Conway is as set as I am against any idea of visits,” she said. “It’s not fair to the child to accustom her to our way of living, and then at seventeen or eighteen turn her off, untrained, to take care of herself.”
There was silence—silence in which the very room seemed to wait for a decision on which lives depended. Then Penelope rose to her feet.