"Maclean?"
"Yes. Now, Elma, don't pretend to look blank about it. It was you who told me."
Elma groaned. (If it only were Mr. Maclean!)
"I told you nothing," she said. "You are not to be trusted, I've always known that, in Stock Exchange or out of it, I'd never tell you a single thing."
"Well, it was Aunt Katharine," said Lance with conviction. She had just appeared in the doorway.
"Well, well," she said in a fat, breathless way. "Well, you're home, and I am glad. Dear, how tall you both are! And is that the latest?" She looked at Mabel's hat. "Well, well. We've had enough trouble with you away. Elma will be ready for none of that nonsense for a year or two, that's one comfort. Jean, you are quite fat. Living in other people's houses seems to agree with you. Not the life we were accustomed to. Young people had to stay at home in my day."
"Now, Aunt Katharine," said Lance, who was a privileged person, "are they your girls, or Mrs. Leighton's, that you lecture them so?"
"Look here, Lance," said Elma, "Aunt Katharine isn't a Broken Hill, or a con--consolidated Johnnie. You just leave her alone, will you?"
"Elma's become beastly dictatorial since she was ill," said Lance savagely. "What's that confab in the corner?"
Mrs. Leighton was sitting with Adelaide Maud, and in the pause which ensued, everybody heard her say, "When Jean was a baby--no, it was when Elma was a baby, and Cuthbert, you know----" just as the girls were afraid she would five long years ago.