They talked about old times just a little, the next morning, both upstairs and down. Louise, lingering in Estelle's room, listening well pleased to her lavish praise of all its adorning, said suddenly,—
"Do you remember this, Estelle?"
"Yes; indeed I do. The very tidy that Fannie Brooks made for your wedding present; and there is that white one I made. O Louise, isn't it funny? Do you remember my asking you what you were going to do with all those tidies?"
"Yes, dear. I told you I would find use for them, and you see I have. Do you remember, also, that you assured me that morning how impossible it would be for you ever to leave papa and mamma and go away with a stranger as I was doing?"
"Well," said Estelle, with an amused, half-ashamed little laugh, "I didn't go away with a stranger; I came with John. You see I didn't know him then."
And again Louise wondered what she would have said of him if she had.
Downstairs, an hour or so afterward, she lingered in the sitting-room to say a few loving words to her own dear mother, and while there Mother Morgan passed the piazza windows, young John by the hand, he loudly discoursing to her as to the beauties of a certain insect which she was being dragged by his eager hand to see.
"Mother spoils him," Louise said, with a complacent laugh, as the boy's shrill voice floated back to them. "She will go anywhere and do anything that he coaxes her to."
"The idea of mother SPOILING anybody!" said Dr. John, with incredulous voice and laughing eyes.
"Well, she certainly does. I suppose all grandmothers do."