Well, I guess that’s all I can think of this time.

* * * * *

’Most four months later.

It’s been ages since I’ve written here, I know.  But there’s nothing special happened.  Everything has been going along just about as it did at the first.  Oh, there is one thing different—­Peter’s gone.  He went two months ago.  We’ve got an awfully old chauffeur now.  One with gray hair and glasses, and homely, too.  His name is Charles.  The very first day he came, Aunt Hattie told me never to talk to Charles, or bother him with questions; that it was better he should keep his mind entirely on his driving.

She needn’t have worried.  I should never dream of asking him the things I did Peter.  He’s too stupid.  Now Peter and I got to be real good friends—­until all of a sudden Grandpa told him he might go.  I don’t know why.

I don’t see as I’m any nearer finding out who Mother’s lover will be than I was four months ago.  I suppose it’s still too soon.  Peter said one day he thought widows ought to wait at least a year, and he guessed grass-widows were just the same.  My, how mad I was at him for using that name about my mother!  Oh, I knew what he meant.  I’d heard it at school. (I know now what it was that made those girls act so queer and horrid.) There was a girl—­I never liked her, and I suspect she didn’t like me, either.  Well, she found out Mother had a divorce.  (You see, I hadn’t told it.  I remembered how those girls out West bragged.) And she told a lot of the others.  But it didn’t work at all as it had in the West.  None of the girls in this school here had a divorce in their families; and, if you’ll believe it, they acted—­some of them—­as if it was a disgrace, even after I told them good and plain that ours was a perfectly respectable and genteel divorce.  Nothing I could say made a mite of difference, with some of the girls, and then is when I first heard that perfectly horrid word, “grass-widow.”  So I knew what Peter meant, though I was furious at him for using it.  And I let him see it good and plain.

Of course I changed schools.  I knew Mother’d want me to, when she knew, and so I told her right away.  I thought she’d be superb and haughty and disdainful sure this time.  But she wasn’t.  First she grew so white I thought she was going to faint away.  Then she began to cry, and kiss and hug me.  And that night I heard her talking to Aunt Hattie and saying, “To think that that poor innocent child has to suffer, too!” and some more which I couldn’t hear, because her voice was all choked up and shaky.

Mother is crying now again quite a lot.  You see, her six months are ’most up, and I’ve got to go back to Father.  And I’m afraid Mother is awfully unhappy about it.  She had a letter last week from Aunt Jane, Father’s sister.  I heard her read it out loud to Aunt Hattie and Grandpa in the library.  It was very stiff and cold and dignified, and ran something like this: