"I shall certainly spare Aunt Keren the annoyance of knowing that one of her own nieces could insult her namesake in the home she has chosen to come to in her trouble," said Happie. Her naturally quick temper did not flare up, but in its stead burned a righteous indignation that made her young eyes rather awful, and Miss Bradbury quailed before them. "My mother—well, you do not know my mother, so there may be some excuse for you, though I can't imagine any. We have all thought Miss Bradbury poor, until now." Happie's eye fell upon the check book, and Miss Helen's following it, she started to pick it up, but Happie forestalled her. "Pardon me, that is not for any one to see," she said. "There is nothing for me to reply to the insults you have heaped upon my mother and upon us all. If you have anything more to say, you will please tell your aunt your plan is to prevent her doing as she likes. And I don't envy you if you do tell her. I will send her in to see you, since you are here, and I don't want her to guess how badly you have behaved. She is not at all well. But while she is visiting us you will please not come here again to see her. If you come I shall not let you in."
Happie walked out of the little room, head up, and with an air that was little less than regal. Inwardly she was in a tumult. It was inconceivable that these two women could have stayed her in her own Patty-Pans parlor to subject her to such treatment! That they did not know her beautiful mother, to whom they imputed such baseness, hardly bettered it. What right had they so to suspect the daughter of Miss Bradbury's dearest friend?
"Aunt Keren, it is your two nieces, Miss Helen and Miss Irene Bradbury. If you don't need my help I won't wait; I am in a wee hurry." Happie steadied her voice to say this at Miss Keren's door, and scuttled away. She dared not risk letting Miss Keren see her tell-tale face, nor hear her voice in one avoidable word.
As soon as she heard Miss Keren go through the hall to the parlor Happie flew to her own room and threw herself face downward on the bed. She pulled the pillows down over her head and burrowed further in under them. The tears that she had been holding back burst forth in a tropical tempest; wounded affection, pride, a cruel sense of injustice against which she was helpless, righteous wrath that her mother could be so misjudged, so outraged, combined to make the tears the bitterest that sunny Happie had ever shed. She cried and cried, and, because she was suffocating herself to keep the sound of her crying down, she kicked her feet and dove further under the pillows till the chance of sweet sleep that night in that particular bed seemed very slender.
Miss Bradbury's nieces did not make a long call. If Happie had not been in such violent contradiction to her nickname she might have discovered from the tones carried out through the little flat by its telescopic construction, that the call was not a particularly pleasant one. As the rustle of skirts and the fall of feet announced the fact that Aunt Keren was conducting her guests to the door, Happie restrained her sobs and lay still, under the fear of being heard, in spite of her upheaval of the pillows.
"You have known me quite long enough, Irene Bradbury," Aunt Keren was saying in her clear-cut accent, and with a vigor of which she had not seemed capable since coming to the Patty-Pans, "to know that if you had set about defeating your own ends you could not have taken a surer method than the one you have employed this afternoon."
"I hope, Aunt Keren," retorted her niece with unmistakable temper, "that your physician is competent. A shock such as you have had requires more than ordinary skill. I should be glad to have him consult with my physician."
"I think mine is quite competent to pronounce on the effect of the shock," said Miss Keren. "It will be made perfectly clear to every one interested that I have sustained no real harm; I will see to that. Don't trouble to come to see me again, Irene. When I need you, I will send for you."