"My name," said that young person, meeting his smiling eye coldly, "is Cecilia."
"But your friends call you Sissy?"
"Yes, my friends do," admitted the perfectionist, with an accent that was supposed to be crushing.
"And you sign yourself so in your letters?" he went on pleasantly.
"My letters?"
"Yes; your informal little notes, you know."
Sissy laid down her spoon. A sudden distaste for eating, for living, for breathing had come upon her. She had forgotten her postscript to that unhappy letter; it was all so long ago, and Aunt Anne's letters never had had a sequel! But before her now the savior's head seemed to bob up and down sickeningly, while a voice cried in her ears so loud she fancied the whole table must hear it:
"You—whoever you are—needn't bother to answer this. None of us Madigans wants your help or annybody else's. It's only that Aunt Anne's got the scribbles, and we'll thank you to mind your own business.
"Sissy Madigan."
The savior threw back his head in a quite boyish way and laughed aloud as he watched her face.
A cold rage seized Sissy. To be laughed at before the whole table! She hated him; she knew she hated him!