“Oh, stuff, Henshaw! You know what I mean. And I'm not going to have English people thinking we're ignorant of the common decencies of life. Lydia shall not go to church in a hat; she had better never go. I will lend her one of my bonnets. Let me see, which one.” She gazed at Lydia in critical abstraction. “I wear rather young bonnets,” she mused aloud, “and we're both rather dark. The only difficulty is I'm so much more delicate—” She brooded upon the question in a silence, from which she burst exulting. “The very thing! I can fuss it up in no time. It won't take two minutes to get it ready. And you'll look just killing in it.” She turned grave again. “Henshaw,” she said, “I wish you would go to church this morning!”
“I would do almost anything for you, Josephine; but really, you know, you oughtn't to ask that. I was there last Sunday; I can't go every Sunday. It's bad enough in England; a man ought to have some relief on the Continent.”
“Well, well. I suppose I oughtn't to ask you,” sighed his wife, “especially as you're going with us to-night.”
“I'll go to-night, with pleasure,” said Mr. Erwin. He rose when his wife and Lydia left the table, and opened the door for them with a certain courtesy he had; it struck even Lydia's uneducated sense as something peculiarly sweet and fine, and it did not overawe her own simplicity, but seemed of kind with it.
The bonnet, when put to proof, did not turn out to be all that it was vaunted. It looked a little odd, from the first; and Mrs. Erwin, when she was herself dressed, ended by taking it off, and putting on Lydia the hat previously condemned. “You're divine in that,” she said. “And after all, you are a traveler, and I can say that some of your things were spoiled coming over,—people always get things ruined in a sea voyage,—and they'll think it was your bonnet.”
“I kept my things very nicely, aunt Josephine,” said Lydia conscientiously. “I don't believe anything was hurt.”
“Oh, well, you can't tell till you've unpacked; and we're not responsible for what people happen to think, you know. Wait!” her aunt suddenly cried. She pulled open a drawer, and snatched two ribbons from it, which she pinned to the sides of Lydia's hat, and tied in a bow under her chin; she caught out a lace veil, and drew that over the front of the hat, and let it hang in a loose knot behind. “Now,” she said, pushing her up to a mirror, that she might see, “it's a bonnet; and I needn't say anything!”
They went in Mrs. Erwin's gondola to the palace in which the English service was held, and Lydia was silent, as she looked shyly, almost fearfully, round on the visionary splendors of Venice.
Mrs. Erwin did not like to be still. “What are you thinking of, Lydia?” she asked.
“Oh! I suppose I was thinking that the leaves were beginning to turn in the sugar orchard,” answered Lydia faithfully. “I was thinking how still the sun would be in the pastures, there, this morning. I suppose the stillness here put me in mind of it. One of these bells has the same tone as our bell at home.”