"Irene? Yes, if it had been Irene, one could expect it," remarked Mrs. Pemberton, funereally.
"But it wasn't—it couldn't be—"
"It was Cecilia." Mrs. Pemberton's grief-stricken tones conveyed all the disappointment she felt.
Cecilia, on her quaking knees, now peering through the window, saw a quick change come over her father's dread countenance. It smoothed, it wrinkled, it twitched, and his shoulders began to shake silently.
"No! Sissy?" he exclaimed, with an appreciative chuckle, which made that young perfectionist outside feel seasick, as though the hillside had swelled up beneath her. "And who was the boy, might I ask?"
"It was"—Mrs. Pemberton paused to mark both her shocked surprise at Mr. Madigan's reception of the news, as well as the further enormity involved in its completion—"my son Crosby."
"No! Ha! ha! ha!" Madigan's rare laugh rang out.
Mechanically Sissy turned down her thumb to mark the number of times she had heard it, since Split and she had made a wager on it. Inwardly, though, she was nauseated by the thought that she was being laughed at. As nearly destitute as a Madigan could be of humor, she would so much rather have been flayed alive, she thought in the depths of her puritanical soul, than suffer ridicule.
"Crosby—eh?" Madigan was recovering. "Congratulate him for me. I didn't know the little milksop had it in him. You ought to thank Sissy, ma'am, for proving that he is not really stuffed with sawdust. Where is she, anyway?"
Lying flat, her blushing face buried in the sage-brush, was Sissy at that moment, while Mrs. Ramrod rustled out of the room, precisely as she had done the day Crosby failed in the public oral examination in geography, Miss Madigan hurrying placatingly after.