“Oh, I don’t know, perhaps so. You see, I have an idea that you are fairly apt to do what you wish in important matters, Tante, even if you do concede the smaller ones.”
Mrs. Burton wrinkled her forehead.
“Do you mean my keeping Juliet Temple here with us this winter when neither you girls nor Aunt Patricia like her? There have been reasons I have not been able to explain; besides, Juliet has been very kind and useful to me.”
Alice Ashton shrugged her shoulders.
“No, I was not thinking of Juliet Temple or any particular case, but she will serve as an example if you like.” Alice appeared entirely undisturbed, although her Camp Fire guardian flushed and looked wounded. Alice was not sensitive and had a fashion of saying what seemed to her the truth without any especial regard for consequences.
“Besides, we should all have been glad to have done for you whatever Juliet Temple has done,” Bettina added.
“But, my dear girls, you were busy with your own work and studies and I did not feel I had the right to interrupt you nor to allow Aunt Patricia to exhaust herself utterly.”
The subject was not an altogether happy one, so there was no further reference to it. A little later Mrs. Burton in the hall of the cabin was distributing the morning mail.
Five minutes after she vanished to her own bed-room carrying half a dozen letters.
The one from her husband she read immediately, and then without glancing at the others began walking up and down her room, her buoyancy of a short time before departed.