Then she sneezed.
"I knew it," she murmured, grimly, to herself. "I felt it coming on this morning!"
She counted again and sneezed, and I sneezed a little myself in a hurried, guilty way. She looked at me with sudden suspicion. She was sharp, almost as sharp as granddad. In a second she had lifted the piano cover, and found a pile of pepper under that well-worn spot. The things which she said were awful. She said them in three or four languages, and she said them in such a high voice that my mother and grandmother came running in alarm. She pointed at me, with a shaking finger.
"Look at your child," she cried. "She lays traps for me! Pepper traps!"
"Rhoda!" my mother exclaimed.
My grandmother seemed stricken dumb.
I hung my head in shame. I had forgotten how sorry they would be.
She told them all about it. She knew just why I had done it, and how I had done it. She declared that she would never give me another lesson. No, never! Her voice grew very loud in her denunciation, and the mild words of shocked apology which my mother put in from time to time were swept away in the torrent of her wrath. I saw my grandmother's lip curl, and my mother look astonished. They were judging her by their own standards of quiet reticence and womanly dignity. She was almost justifying me.
Yet before she went she lodged an arrow in my mother's heart.
"As for the child's talent," she cried, and snapped her fingers. "It would be as easy to teach her the tight-rope!"