Right now?"

So Miss Eliza proceeded.

"Your father," she announced, in a tone that plainly indicated her hearty disapproval of the whole affair, and plunging at once into the very middle of her subject, "has married again!"

"Married again!" echoed Arethusa, uncertainly.

The effect of her aunt's disclosure was as though some one had thrown a bulky object at her quite unexpectedly.

"That's what I said, I believe. It's what I intended to say. Shut your mouth, child,--you look half-witted with it open that way. I always did think he would. And I must confess I never thought he'd wait near as long as he has. Though I'm no great believer in second marriages, myself."

"But, Aunt 'Liza ..."

Miss Eliza frowned at the interruption.

"Will you wait, Arethusa? Till I finish!"

Arethusa might have retorted, and very properly, that nothing had been really begun as yet, by jumping into a middle without preamble. But then, Miss Eliza had her own most individual way of doing everything, even to telling of the contents of important letters.

"When I have finished, you may read his letter for yourself. His new wife," she crowded a quant.i.ty of scorn into those two words, "wants you to come visit them. He says she does. They both do. She has sent ..."

Arethusa sprang, starry-eyed, from her ha.s.sock. Her hands flew, clasped, up to her heart to hold its beating down.

"To Europe? Oh, Aunt 'Liza!"

"Will you _wait_!! I must say! To Europe, indeed! He's in America!"

And then Arethusa gave such a shriek of joy that it echoed through and through the house. Mandy, in the kitchen, looked inquiringly at Blish as it penetrated there. Miss Asenath smiled; Miss Let.i.tia's crochet needle slipped clear out of the st.i.tch she was just taking: and Miss Eliza put her hands over her ears.

"_Arethusa!!_ If you don't sit down!..."

So Arethusa subsided to the ha.s.sock, still quivering. Miss Asenath gave her a rea.s.suring pat and her frail hand was grabbed and held tight.

Such composure as could be managed came easier with something to squeeze.

Miss Eliza continued her tale.

"Yes, his new wife, thank heaven, is an American, and I reckon she wants to live at home." Then to herself, parenthetically, "I was always afraid he'd marry one of those frog-eating foreigners he's been trotting around with so long, and I must say I'm mightily surprised that he didn't."

She paused a moment and looked at Arethusa over her gla.s.ses as if Arethusa were the one to blame for this situation. Although the girl did not dare open her mouth in face of such an expression, she gave a little jump of impatience. It did seem as if Miss Eliza might finish telling It, and tell It straight, in some sort of order, if she were going to tell It at all.

"They want you to come visit them," repeated Miss Eliza, after her parenthesis and the little pause, "and your father's sent the money, as he says, for your 'immediate needs.' Over one hundred dollars it is. He says his wife gave it to him. She must be mighty well-off. 'Immediate needs,' indeed! I can buy your whole winter wardrobe with that money!"

Then once more did Arethusa rush recklessly in where angels would have feared to tread.

"Oh, Aunt 'Liza!..." A belated discretion came to her aid before she finished.

Miss Eliza frowned again. Her lips drew ominously down, and reprimand of some sort was plainly to be detected hovering there, but, for some obscure reason, she also changed her mind.

"Your Aunt 't.i.tia," she said, rather mildly, and thus apparently shifting all responsibility for any evil, which might ensue from this step to Miss Let.i.tia's plumper shoulders, "your Aunt 't.i.tia has decided that so long as this is nearly August, there's no earthly use in your going to visit them until fall. So I'm going to write your father that.

He may not like it, because he wants you right away, his letter says.

But it would be downright foolishness to get you more summer clothes this late in the season; and you haven't near enough now, nor the right kind, to visit in a city. It's just like him, for all the world, this whole affair. Letting you alone for this long, and then all of a sudden wanting you to be bundled right off to him! You'll be needing winter clothes in a month or two," she finished decidedly, "so you're going in the fall." Then she added, much more to herself, however, than to Arethusa, "But I must say, I strongly doubt the wisdom of your going at all."

She settled back in her chair with the air of one having said her say, but leaving her niece with a feeling strongly resembling dissatisfaction.

Miss Eliza had simply flung these few facts at her without any elaboration; sketched in the bare outlines to what, viewed by Arethusa, a whole volume might be added without doing anywhere near full justice to the Subject. There was that matter of the "new wife," especially.

One's only father does not get married every day, and to dismiss the lady of his choice by simply stating her existence does not gratify a thousandth part of natural curiosity. Her father, she knew, had written more than just the simple fact of his marriage. If he had done just that; then it was certainly not her father who had written the letter.

Miss Eliza had not told her when ... or where ... or ...

Arethusa gazed at her aunt, clasping and unclasping her hands helplessly; her lips parted for speech, but no words came, for so many words trembled there, they literally dammed one another up.

"I ... Did Father ..." she managed to gasp, finally.

But Miss Eliza seemed to read through this inadequacy of expression some of that chaos of thought which whirled round and round in Arethusa's brain. She reached down in the little leather pocket that always hung at her belt and drew out a large, square envelope.

"Here, child, I said you could read it," and although her tone was as sharp as always, it was not unkind. "That woman he married. You want to know, I reckon. Some more about her. It's perfectly natural. He's gone into all sorts of raptures over her, of course. He wouldn't be Ross Worthington if he hadn't. And she is very probably just an ordinary female woman."

Arethusa seized the outstretched envelope eagerly.

"May I...?" she asked.

She spoke to Miss Asenath, who nodded a permission to the unfinished but evident request before either of the other aunts had a chance to refuse it.

So Arethusa was off like the wind, unheeding of the anxious call Miss Let.i.tia sent after her.

Out through the back of the house this time, and on through the kitchen where she paused only long enough to squeeze Mandy, one of her staunchest allies and a certain sharer in all joys, to whirl her clear around from her table where she was working, and to wave the Letter at her excitedly and then plunge on, leaving Mandy absolutely breathless with the suddenness of this onslaught.

The rain was falling now, slowly but steadily, in big heavy drops, and the darkest clouds were lowering, apparently right above her head; but the flying girl paid no attention to these evidences of the imminence of her storm. She held the Letter pressed close against her as if to protect it and made straight for Miss Asenath's Woods, via the orchard.

CHAPTER III

Arethusa flung herself flat on a mossy spot of ground underneath the largest and tallest of the trees in Miss Asenath's Woods.

Like the vaulted ceiling of a huge green cathedral, the branches far above her curved in graceful arches. And they were so thickly interlaced and grown with leaves, that although this first slow-falling rain of the storm could be distinctly heard in its noisy pattering on those leaves, very little came through them, save an extra large and splashing drop every now and then.

Having run every step of the way from the house, Arethusa was completely out of breath: and she could only lie panting for some moments, the Letter still clutched to her breast.

The wind had died down, and it was as hot and close out here in the open under the trees as it had seemed in the shut-up sitting room. But she was far from any thought of physical discomfort now.

At the beginning of Miss Asenath's Romance those many years ago, her father, Arethusa's great-grandfather Redfield, had set aside this strip of woodland in which to build his daughter a house.

It was not nearly so heavily wooded then, and the lovers had wandered over it and selected a spot for the little home, mute evidence of their choice of site remaining in a half-dug foundation, overgrown with vines and weeds and almost indistinguishable save for the few heavy stones that marked one side of the depression. But the walls of the little house had risen in fancy for her with such reality, that, when the sad ending to her love-story came and the building was abandoned, at Miss Asenath's request the woodland was fenced off. Hence, its name of "Miss Asenath's Woods." She had never gone there since the day when with her own hands she had spread a layer of mortar between two stones "for luck," but she knew every inch of it as it was now, every tree and bush, from Arethusa's vivid description. Arethusa's imagination could for herself, from Miss Asenath's telling, place the little house on its ghostly foundation in all the actuality it was once to have had.