“She—she wanted to—see me,” faltered Caroline.
“To see you!” echoed Cousin Penelope. “Why should she dream of associating with you, Jacqueline?”
Bewildered and badgered, Caroline knew that she must say something.
“We—we were on the train—coming from Chicago,” she said in a voice that see-sawed, though she tried hard to keep it steady. “We played together—with Mildred. Oh, she’s a nice little girl, Cousin Penelope, honest, she is—you’d like her—she’s nicer than me—ever so much so!”
She had thought she hadn’t a tear left in her, but now she began to cry again, not noisily, but in soft little tired gasps. Oh, how was it that clinging heroines in books always managed to swoon? She wished that she could swoon, then and there, and so escape from everything. She couldn’t bear to have Cousin Penelope ask her even one more question.
But Cousin Penelope stopped questioning. Amazingly she put her arm round Caroline’s tense little shoulders, and dabbed her eyes gently with her filmy handkerchief, which smelt like a breeze over beds of violets.
“There, there!” she said. “You mustn’t make your eyes red, on the night before your party. You must have forgotten the party.”
Forgotten the party! If only Cousin Penelope guessed!
They went back together through the dusky, fragrant garden. Cousin Penelope urged Caroline to look at the little pale stars, which were coming out now almost as fast as you could count them in the sky, that was the color of tarnished old silver.
“It will be a fine day to-morrow,” Penelope told Caroline. “You don’t realize, you little Californian, how we have to study the sky, here in New England, when we plan to give a garden-party.”