“It's twelve o'clock, an hour after the club's curfew.”
“Well,” remarked Henry, rousing from the fit of abstraction in which he had been pursuing the subject of their previous discussion, “it was to be expected we should get a little mixed as to chronology over such talk as this.”
“With our watches set fifty years ahead, there 'll be no danger of overstaying our time next Wednesday, anyhow,” added Frank.
Soon the girls presented themselves in readiness for outdoors, and, in a pleasant gust of good-bys and parting jests, the party broke up.
“Good-by for fifty years,” Jessie called after them from the stoop, as the merry couples walked away in the moonlight.
The following week was one of numerous consultations among the girls. Grandmother Fellows's wardrobe was pretty thoroughly rummaged under that good-natured old lady's superintendence, and many were the queer effects of old garments upon young figures which surprised the steady-going mirror in her quiet chamber.
“I 'm afraid I can never depend on it again,” said Mrs. Fellows.'
She had promised to be at the party.
“She looked so grave when I first asked her,” Mary explained to the girls, “that I was sorry I spoke of it. I was afraid she thought we wanted her only as a sort of convenience, to help out our pantomime by the effect of her white hair. But in a minute she smiled in her cheery way, and said, as if she saw right through me: 'I suppose, my child, you think being old a sort of misfortune, like being hunchbacked or blind, and are afraid of hurting my feelings, but you need n't be. The good Lord has made it so that at whichever end of life we are, the other end looks pretty uninteresting, and if it won't hurt your feelings to have somebody in the party who has got through all the troubles you have yet before you, I should be glad to come.' That was turning the tables for us pretty neatly, eh, girls?”
The young ladies would not have had the old lady guess it for worlds, but truth compels me to own that all that week they improved every opportunity furtively to study Mrs. Fellows's gait and manner, with a view to perfecting their parts.