“There, there, Mary, it’s getting late.  You’ve talked enough—­too much.  Now go to bed.  Good-night.”

Talked too much, indeed!  And who’d been making me do all the talking, I should like to know?  But, of course, I couldn’t say anything.  That’s the unfair part of it.  Old folks can say anything, anything they want to to you, but you can’t say a thing back to them—­not a thing.

And so I went to bed.  And the next day all that Father said to me was, “Good-morning, Mary,” and, “Good-night,” just as he had ever since I came.  And that’s all he’s said yesterday and to-day.  But he’s looked at me.  He’s looked at me a lot.  I know, because at mealtimes and others, when he’s been in the room with me, I’ve looked up and found his eyes on me.  Funny, isn’t it?

* * * * *

Two weeks later.

Well, I don’t know as I have anything very special to say.  Still, I suppose I ought to write something; so I’ll put down what little there is.

Of course, there doesn’t so much happen here, anyway, as there does at home—­I mean in Boston. (I must stop calling it home down to Boston as if this wasn’t home at all.  It makes Aunt Jane very, very angry, and I don’t think Father likes it very well.) But, as I was saying, there really doesn’t so much happen here as there does down to Boston; and it isn’t nearly so interesting.  But, there!  I suppose I mustn’t expect it to be interesting.  I’m Mary now, not Marie.

There aren’t any teas and dinners and pretty ladies and music and soulful-eyed prospective suitors here.  My!  Wouldn’t Aunt Jane have four fits?  And Father, too.  But I’d just like to put one of Mother’s teas with the little cakes and flowers and talk and tinkling laughs down in Aunt Jane’s parlor, and then watch what happened.  Oh, of course, the party couldn’t stand it long—­not in there with the hair wreath and the coffin plate.  But they could stand it long enough for Father to thunder from the library, “Jane, what in Heaven’s name is the meaning of all this?” And for Aunt Jane to give one look at the kind of clothes real folks wear, and then flee with her hands to her ears and her eyes upraised to the ceiling.  Wouldn’t it be fun?

But, there!  What’s the use of imagining perfectly crazy, impossible things like that?  We haven’t had a thing here in that parlor since I came but one missionary meeting and one Ladies’ Aid Sewing Circle; and after the last one (the Sewing Circle) Aunt Jane worked a whole day picking threads off the carpet, and smoothing down the linen covers because they’d got so mussed up.  And I heard her tell the hired girl that she shouldn’t have that Sewing Circle here again in a hurry, and when she did have them they’d have to sew in the dining-room with a sheet spread down to catch the threads.  My! but I would like to see Aunt Jane with one of Mother’s teas in her parlor!