"Oh, I don't suppose she'll do that exactly."
"Well, it's just the same thing. If she's such a model, as your mother says, she'll make you feel uncomfortable all the time. Then if she's wearing mourning, she can't do the things that you do, and you'll have to stay at home and be polite to her. Yes, I'm really sorry for you, Brenda."
With sympathy like this, Brenda began to regard herself as almost a martyr.
"Oh, dear," she sighed, "why couldn't she have waited until next winter? Come, Belle," she continued, "you'll stay to dinner, won't you?"
Belle hesitated for a moment. "I suppose I ought to go home."
"Oh, why?"
Belle was silent. She knew that certain unfinished lessons awaited her, and that her grandmother objected to her dining away from home, unless she had first asked permission. She fortified herself, however, by saying to herself, "Oh, well, mother won't care." For her mother was what is commonly known as easy-going, and seldom interfered with her daughter's goings and comings.
Belle always enjoyed dining with Brenda. The dining-room was so attractive with its great blazing fire, its heavy draperies and cheerful oil-paintings on the wall. At home she sat down in a large, severely furnished room, with her solemn grandmother wrapped in a white knitted shawl at one end of the long table, her half-deaf uncle James at the other end, and her brother Jack on the side opposite her. Her delicate mother often dined upstairs. Uncle James usually had some story to tell of misdeeds that he had heard some one ascribe to Jack ("and how a deaf person can hear I don't see," Jack would say crossly to Brenda). Her grandmother generally read Belle herself a lecture on paying proper respect to one's elders, or some similar subject, while Belle and Jack exchanged glances of mischievous intelligence, which often drew strong reproofs from their grandmother, and sometimes from her mother when she was present.
No wonder, then, that Brenda's invitation was a strong temptation to Belle.
"Come, silence gives consent," laughed Brenda. Dragging Belle by the arm, she touched the door-bell, and in a moment the two girls were inside the house.