“Yes. She is a very sweet girl.”
“Hm-m; I suppose so. Still, I think 'twould have been better if Cyril could have selected some one that wasn't musical—say a more domestic wife. He's so terribly unpractical himself about household matters.”
Billy gave a ringing laugh and stood up. The car had come to a stop before her own door.
“Do you? Just you wait till you see Marie's trousseau of—egg-beaters and cake tins,” she chuckled.
Mrs. Hartwell looked blank.
“Whatever in the world do you mean, Billy?” she demanded fretfully, as she followed her hostess from the car. “I declare! aren't you ever going to grow beyond making those absurd remarks of yours?”
“Maybe—sometime,” laughed Billy, as she took little Kate's hand and led the way up the steps.
Luncheon in the cozy dining-room at Hillside that day was not entirely a success. At least there were not present exactly the harmony and tranquillity that are conceded to be the best sauce for one's food. The wedding, of course, was the all-absorbing topic of conversation; and Billy, between Aunt Hannah's attempts to be polite, Marie's to be sweet-tempered, Mrs. Hartwell's to be dictatorial, and her own to be pacifying as well as firm, had a hard time of it. If it had not been for two or three diversions created by little Kate, the meal would have been, indeed, a dismal failure.
But little Kate—most of the time the personification of proper little-girlhood—had a disconcerting faculty of occasionally dropping a word here, or a question there, with startling effect. As, for instance, when she asked Billy “Who's going to boss your wedding?” and again when she calmly informed her mother that when she was married she was not going to have any wedding at all to bother with, anyhow. She was going to elope, and she should choose somebody's chauffeur, because he'd know how to go the farthest and fastest so her mother couldn't catch up with her and tell her how she ought to have done it.
After luncheon Aunt Hannah went up-stairs for rest and recuperation. Marie took little Kate and went for a brisk walk—for the same purpose. This left Billy alone with her guest.