"Nor Jack, either," put in Cynthia, eagerly, with a lightened heart.
"I think you are too good to her, Aunt Betsey," said Mr. Franklin, as they walked towards the house. "I brought her up here to-day for the sole purpose of apologizing."
"Do tell! And I nearly disremembered it entirely! But I'm real glad to see you and my new niece. Come right into the best parlor."
She opened the door, and with reverent step ushered them into the carefully kept "best parlor." An immaculate carpet, ever shielded from the light of day, covered the floor, and a horse-hair sofa and a few chairs of the same inhospitable material stood at regular intervals from one another.
A pair of tall vases and some sea-shells decked the mantel-piece. During their childhood it had been a rare treat to Jack and Cynthia to hold these shells to their ears and listen to the "roar of the ocean" within. On a table between the windows were some wax flowers under a glass, and on the marble-topped centre table were a few books placed together in neat little piles.
Mrs. Franklin was given the place of honor, the large arm-chair. The chair being a high one, and she being a rather small woman, her feet barely touched the floor, and she sat in constant terror lest she should slide ignominiously to the ground.
It was so dark when they entered the room that Mr. Franklin stumbled over a worsted-work footstool which stood in a prominent place, but Miss Trinkett opened the blinds a crack, and two bars of blazing July sunshine fell across the carpet. Then she sat down to entertain her guests, but her mind wandered. The Franklins all talked, but Miss Betsey was unusually silent. "I want to know!" and "Do tell!" came at random. Finally she said, with a hasty glance at the sunlight:
"I wonder now if you'd mind coming into my sitting-room? I'd be real pleased to have you, and maybe we'd find it cooler."
They all jumped to their feet with alacrity. Miss Betsey closed her blinds again with a sigh of relief, and in the freer atmosphere of the sitting-room, secure in the knowledge that her best-parlor carpet was no longer fading, she found her tongue.
"I was coming to see you, niece, just as soon as I could see my way to it. Marthy, my hired girl, has been off for a spell, and that's kept me busy. I'd have written, but I'm a poor hand at writing. Silas he says he wonders the letters I write ever get there, but then he's one of the doubting kind, Silas is. I've great faith in government. I think as long as they undertake to carry letters about at all, they've got sense enough to carry 'em safe, even if I do disremember part of the direction sometimes. And it's wonderful, as I've said many a time before, what you can send through the mails nowadays. But now tell me about those poor little orphans in the poultry-yard."