"Lyra, I can't allow you to say such things to me."

"No; that's what I've kept saying to myself all the time. But you would have it _out_ of me. _I_ didn't want to say it."

It was impossible to resist Lyra's pretended deprecation. Annie laughed. "I suppose I can't help people's talking, and I ought to be too old to care."

"You ought, but you're not," said Lyra flatteringly. "Well, Annie, what do you think of our little evening at Mrs. Munger's in the dim retrospect?

Poor Ralph! What did the doctor say about him?" She listened with so keen a relish for the report of Putney's sayings that Annie felt as if she had been turning the affair into comedy for Lyra's amus.e.m.e.nt. "Oh dear, I wish I could hear him! I thought I should have died last night when he came back, and began to scare everybody blue with his highly personal remarks.

I wish he'd had time to get round to the Northwicks."

"Lyra," said Annie, nerving herself to the office; "don't you think it was wicked to treat that poor girl as you did?"

"Well, I suppose that's the way some people might look at it," said Lyra dispa.s.sionately.

"Then how--_how_ could you do it?"

"Oh, it's easy enough to behave wickedly, Annie, when you feel like it,"

said Lyra, much amused by Annie's fervour, apparently. "Besides, I don't know that it was so _very_ wicked. What makes you think it was?"

"Oh, it wasn't that merely. Lyra, may I--_may_ I speak to you plainly, frankly--like a sister?" Annie's heart filled with tenderness for Lyra, with the wish to help her, to save a person who charmed her so much.

"Well, like a _step_-sister, you may," said Lyra demurely.

"It wasn't for her sake alone that I hated to see it. It was for your sake--for _his_ sake."

"Well, that's very kind of you, Annie," said Lyra, without the least resentment. "And I know what you mean. But it really doesn't hurt either Jack or me. I'm not very goody-goody, Annie; I don't pretend to be; but I'm not very baddy-baddy either. I a.s.sure you"--Lyra laughed mischievously--"I'm one of the very few persons in Hatboro' who are better than they should be."

"I know it, Lyra--I know it. But you have no right to keep him from taking a fancy to some young girl--and marrying her; to keep him to yourself; to make people talk."

"There's something in that," Lyra a.s.sented, with impartiality. "But I don't think it would be well for Jack to marry yet; and if I see him taking a fancy to any real nice girl, I sha'n't interfere with him. But I shall be very _particular_, Annie."

She looked at Annie with such a droll mock earnest, and shook her head with such a burlesque of grandmotherly solicitude, that Annie laughed in spite of herself. "Oh, Lyra, Lyra!"

"And as for me," Lyra went on, "I a.s.sure you I don't care for the little bit of harm it does me."

"But you ought--you ought!" cried Annie. "You ought to respect yourself enough to care. You ought to respect other women enough."

"Oh, I guess I'd let the balance of the s.e.x slide, Annie," said Lyra.

"No, you mustn't; you can't. We are all bound together; we owe everything to each other."

"Isn't that rather Peckish?" Lyra suggested.

"I don't know. But it's true, Lyra. And I shouldn't be ashamed of getting it from Mr. Peck."

"Oh, I didn't say you would be."

"And I hope you won't be hurt with me. I know that it's a most unwarrantable thing to speak to you about such a matter; but you know why I do it."

"Yes, I suppose it's because you like me; and I appreciate that, I a.s.sure you, Annie."

Lyra was soberer than she had yet been, and Annie felt that she was really gaining ground. "And your husband; you ought to respect _him_--"

Lyra laughed out with great relish. "Oh, now, Annie, you _are_ joking!

Why in the _world_ should I respect Mr. Wilmington? An old man like him marrying a young girl like me!" She jumped up and laughed at the look in Annie's face. "Will you go round with me to the Putneys? thought Ellen might like to see us."

"No, no. I can't go," said Annie, finding it impossible to recover at once from the quite unanswerable blow her sense of decorum--she thought it her moral sense--had received.

"Well, you'll be glad to have _me_ go, anyway," said Lyra. She saw Annie shrinking from her, and she took hold of her, and pulled her up and kissed her. "You dear old thing! I wouldn't hurt your feelings for the world. And whichever it is, Annie, the parson or the doctor, I wish him joy."

That afternoon, as Annie was walking to the village, the doctor drove up to the sidewalk, and stopped near her. "Miss Kilburn, I've got a letter from home. They write me about my mother in a way that makes me rather anxious, and I shall run down to Chelsea this evening."

"Oh, I'm sorry for your bad news. I hope it's nothing serious."

"She's old; that's the only cause for anxiety. But of course I must go."

"Oh yes, indeed. I do hope you'll find all right with her."

"Thank you very much. I'm sorry that I must leave Putney at such a time.

But I leave him with Mr. Peck, who's promised to be with him. I thought you'd like to know."

"Yes, I do; it's very kind of you--very kind indeed."

"Thank you," said the doctor. It was not the phrase exactly, but it served the purpose of the cordial interest in which they parted as well as another.

XXI.

During the days that Mr. Peck had consented to leave Idella with her Annie took the whole charge of the child, and grew into an intimacy with her that was very sweet. It was not necessary to this that Idella should be always tractable and docile, which she was not, but only that she should be affectionate and dependent; Annie found that she even liked her to be a little baddish; it gave her something to forgive; and she experienced a perverse pleasure in discovering that the child of a man so self-forgetful as Mr. Peck was rather more covetous than most children. It also amused her that when some of Idella's shabby playmates from Over the Track casually found their way to the woods past Annie's house, and tried to tempt Idella to go with them, the child disowned them, and ran into the house from them; so soon was she alienated from her former life by her present social advantages. She apparently distinguished between Annie and the Boltons, or if not quite this, she showed a distinct preference for her company, and for her part of the house. She hung about Annie with a flattering curiosity and interest in all she did. She lost every trace of shyness with her, but developed an intense admiration for her in every way--for her dresses, her rings, her laces, for the elegancies that marked her a gentlewoman. She p.r.o.nounced them prettier than Mrs. Warner's things, and the house prettier and larger.

"Should you like to live with me?" Annie asked.

The child seemed to reflect. Then she said, with the indirection of her age and s.e.x, pushing against Annie's knee, "I don't know what your name is."

"Have you never heard my name? It's Annie. How do you like it?"

"It's--it's too short," said the child, from her readiness always to answer something that charmed Annie.

"Well, then you can make it longer. You can call me Aunt Annie. I think that will be better for a little girl; don't you?"

"Mothers can whip, but aunts can't," said Idella, bringing a practical knowledge, acquired from her observation of life Over the Track, to a consideration of the proposed relation.

"I know _one_ aunt who won't," said Annie, touched by the reply.

Sat.u.r.day evening Idella's father came for her; and with a preamble which seemed to have been unnecessary when he understood it, Annie asked him to let her keep the child, at least till he had settled himself in a house of his own, or, she hinted, in some way more comfortable for Idella than he was now living. In her anxiety to make him believe that she was not taking too great a burden on her hands, she became slowly aware that no fear of this had apparently troubled him, and that he was looking at the whole matter from a point outside of questions of polite ceremonial, even of personal feeling.