"Perhaps another time," answered her aunt with an involuntary gesture of putting the chalice from her as Corinne spoke of Irma. It was her nearest approach to complaint, but Corinne quite knew what it meant.
"Except for Carli it hasn't all been too bad?" she questioned entreatingly.
"No, no, indeed, truly. Only I've seen so much, Inny," she answered saying the baby name for Corinne, so long unused, "so much of—of human beings," she ended quite detachèdly and her eyes got very wide and wandered a little.
"Irma is hard, I know," and Corinne put her hand out to find her aunt's, to hold her attention, "but she has that alcove and I thought, too, it would be a way to help the boys. I'm always worrying about the boys, and then it's almost impossible to find a place to lay one's head."
"The foxes of the earth," began Tante Ilde with a still stranger look on her face and then stopped.
Corinne was overcome by a quick anguish. Something was hurting her terribly though she couldn't have said which one of many things, and her aunt was suddenly as someone she had never known.
Tante Ilde had always had her little phrases and mottoes—but not like that. "Time brings roses," she would say consolingly to any child who was unhappy in the old days. "Hard work in youth is sweet rest in old age," when the boys wouldn't study; and she often reminded the girls that "Beauty goes, but virtue stays."
"You're looking so pale, darling, you're not ill, are you?" Corinne asked, after a moment breaking anxiously into that new, disturbing silence.
"No, just a little cold, my shoulders ache a bit,—then all the tears," she answered, "nothing more."
"Are you warmly enough dressed?" pursued Corinne, after another pause during which her eyes had wandered again to the door.