"Alone?" she repeated, with sudden interest. "Has your folks all gone too?"
The spyglass from the roof had discerned a white gown on the Benslow piazza, but the disturbing question had been to whom it belonged. Mrs. Lindsay or her daughter might have been keeping the invalid company, while Miss Linda wandered away for a walk. The little girl's brain worked fast.
"Say, I'm sorry I was impident to you," she said, with conciliatory meekness.
"Well, you'd better be," snapped Luella, pausing to loosen a point of her parasol from the fringe of her cape.
"Say, you don't need to hurry right off, do you? I'm all alone."
Miss Benslow looked suspiciously at the speaker. It was too much to ask one to believe that saucy Blanche Aurora, with her tip-tilted nose and her bold eyes, was really penitent.
"Yes, I do," she retorted, unmollified. "If this pesky parasol will ever let go that fringe."
"Let me fix it," offered the meek one; and she did fix it so effectively that for almost five minutes more Miss Benslow stood there, fuming.
"Oh, pshaw, let it go!" she exclaimed at last, jerking away; and with the jerk the parasol freed itself.
"Oh, say, Luella—I mean Miss Benslow. I feel so kind o' lonely. You've got a fireless cooker, hain't you? I don't see why you have to hurry so."