While Norah searched for something in one of the cases, Miss Wilbur peeped around the chair back at the occupant of the window who was employing herself with knitting. She was not—so Miss Virginia thought—as attractive as her associate, although she could not be called ordinary. Meanwhile James Mandeville investigated her shopping bag with absorbed interest.
The opening of the shop door interrupted her thoughts, and before she had time to push aside the draperies which, disposed upon the rack, intervened between her and the door, she heard a cool, clear voice announce, "I wish a spool of twist—black if you please."
Miss Virginia gazed wildly toward the door at the other end of the room, her first impression being that Caroline had come in search of her. The next moment she realized with surprise and amusement that her sister had come altogether on her own account and had asked for the very same thing she herself had thought of purchasing. Miss Virginia braced herself for the inevitable encounter, and when Miss Norah returned, thanked her for her kindness in showing so many of her wares, and selected one from the collars before her. The while she heard her sister's voice.
"Do you consider this a good locality for a shop?" Mrs. Millard asked. "It seems to me quite otherwise, and I think it the only proper course to tell you that the neighborhood strongly objects to such an intrusion."
Miss Virginia felt her face grow hot.
"Isn't it a little late to tell us this?" The tall young woman who had put down her knitting to serve the newcomer seemed not a whit abashed at Mrs. Millard's manner. If anything, she was the more queenly of the two, and might have been bestowing a favor as she handed back the change.
Norah's sunny face intervened, "We are very sorry if you don't want us," she said, "for we shall have to stay for the present. We think we are quite as nice as a drug store, and perhaps we shall be able to convince you of it before long."
Could Caroline hold out against such winning address? What she might have said or done was never known, for James Mandeville, desiring to see what was going on, and attempting to crawl under the rack with its burden of fabrics, precipitated it upon himself and was lost in the ruins, while Miss Virginia was revealed in all her ignominy, with a flannel donkey in her lap, to the eyes of her relative.
"Virginia! I am astonished!"
Miss Wilbur rose to the occasion. "So am I, Caroline. I, too, came to get a spool of twist." There is good authority for the assertion that one may smile and be a villain, but hitherto such depths of perfidy had been unsuspected in Miss Virginia.