"Oh, mother! mother! I have left her alone all this time."
"Exactly! Now don't go into a caniption, because it won't do any good. Here comes Direxia with your breakfast—you eat it and then we'll go and see your mother."
Out of doors the morning was bright and clear. Mrs. Malvina Weight, sweeping her front chamber, with an anxious eye on the house opposite, saw the door open and Mrs. Tree come out, followed by a tall young man. The old lady wore the huge black velvet bonnet, surmounted by a bird of paradise, which she had brought from Paris forty years before, and an India shawl which had pointed a moral to the pious of Elmerton for more than that length of time. Mrs. Weight's curiosity knew no bounds when she saw them turn into the old Jaquith place. She would have been more astounded if she could have heard Mrs. Tree begin at once with:
"Well, Mary Jaquith, here you sit!"
"Mrs. Tree! Is this you?" asked Mrs. Jaquith; "my dear soul, what brings you out so early in the morning? Come in! come in! who is with you?"
"I didn't say any one was with me! Don't you go to setting double-action ears like mine, Mary, because you are not old enough to. How are you? Obstinate as ever?"
"Take this chair, it's the one you always like. How am I obstinate, dear Mrs. Tree?"
"If I've asked you once to come and live with me, I've asked you fifty times," grumbled the old lady, sitting down with a good deal of flutter and rustle. "There I must stay, left alone at my age, with nobody but that old goose of a Direxia Hawkes to look after me. And all because you like to be independent. Set you up! Well, I shan't ask you again, and so I've come to tell you, Mary Jaquith."
"Dear old friend, you forgive me, I know. You never can have thought for a moment, seriously, that I could be a burden on your kind hands. There surely is some one with you, Mrs. Tree! Is it Direxia? Please be seated, whoever it is."
There was a slight sound, as of a sob checked in the outbreak. Mrs. Tree shook her head fiercely. The blind woman rose from her seat, very pale.