Anna did not know, but promised to make it her business to inquire, and also to see that some pots of ivies were sent to Hetherton Place before the guests arrived.
The ruse had succeeded, and Miss Anna, who felt that she was deferred to, was in a much better frame of mind when she was at last set down at her mother’s door. She found her grandmother in the sitting-room, and at once recounted to her all she had seen at Hetherton Place, and how she was to send over some ivies and hunt up a blue silk quilt for Reinette’s bed.
“A blue silk bed-quilt this swelterin’ weather? What under the sun does she want of that?” grandma asked, and Anna explained that Cousin Ethel had a pink silk quilt because her room was pink, and Cousin Grace had blue because her room was blue. It was a fashion, that was all.
“Fiddlesticks on the fashion!” her grandmother replied. “Better save the money for something else. If Rennet must have an extra comforter, there’s that patch-work quilt, herrin’-bone pattern, which her mother pieced when she was ten years old. It took the prize at the cattle show, and I’ve kep’ it ever sense as a sort of memoir. If Rennet is any kind of a girl she’ll think a sight on’t because it was her mother’s work. I shall send it over with the cat and kittens.”
“Cat and kittens! What do you mean?” Anna asked, in unfeigned surprise, and her grandmother explained that Rennet’s father had written she was very fond of cats, and Phil wanted some for her, and she was going to give her Speckle and the Maltas.
Anna, who was above such weaknesses as a love for cats, sniffed contemptuously, and thought her cousin must be a very silly, childish person; “but then grandma,” she added, “you may as well call her by her right name, which isn’t Rennet, but Reinette, with the accent on the last syllable.”
“Oh, yes, I forgot,” said grandma. “Phil told me not to call her Rennet, but what’s the difference? I mean to do my duty by her, and show Fred Hetherton that I know what is what. We must all go up in percession to meet ’em, and, then, go with ’em to the house, and your mother is goin’ to fix me a new cap in case we stay to tea, and if it ain’t too hot I shall wear my morey, and if it is, I guess I’ll wear that pinkish sprigged muslin with my lammy shawl, and you, Anny, must wear your best clothes, for we don’t want ’em to think we are back-woodsy.”
There was no danger of Anna’s wearing anything but her best clothes, and for the next three days she busied herself with thinking what was most becoming to her, deciding at last upon white muslin and a blue sash, with her long lace scarf fastened with a blush-rose, her white chip hat faced with blue and turned up on one side, with a cream-colored feather drooping down the back. This she thought would be altogether au fait, and sure to impress Reinette with the fact that she was somebody.
Anna was getting quite interested in her new cousin, with whom she meant to stand well; and though she said the contrary, she was really glad that Ethel and Grace Rossiter were both absent, thus leaving her to represent alone the young-ladyhood of the family.
Such was the state of affairs on the morning when the paper announced that the Russia had reached New York the previous afternoon—a piece of news which, though expected, threw Mr. Beresford, and Phil, and the Fergusons into a state of great excitement.