Then there’s Miss Grace Ann Sanborn.  She’s fat, and awfully jolly.  She comes here a lot lately to see Aunt Jane.  I don’t know why.  They don’t belong to the same church, or anything.  But she “runs over,” as she calls it, almost every afternoon just a little before dinner—­I mean supper.

Mrs. Darling used to come then, too, when I first came; but she comes over evenings now more.  Maybe it’s because she doesn’t like Miss Grace Ann.  I don’t think she does like her, for every time she saw her, she’d say:  “Oh, you?  So you’re here!” And then she’d turn and talk to Aunt Jane and simply ignore Miss Grace Ann.  And pretty quick she’d get up and go.  And now she comes evenings.  She’s fixing over her house, and she runs and asks Aunt Jane’s advice about every little thing.  She asks Father’s, too, every chance she gets, when she sees him in the hall or on the front steps.  I heard her tell Aunt Jane she considered Professor Anderson a man of most excellent taste and judgment.

I suppose Mrs. Darling could be my new mother.  She’s a widow.  Her husband died last year.  She is very well off now that her husband is dead, I heard Aunt Jane say one day.  She meant well off in money—­quite a lot of it, you know.  I thought she meant well off because he was dead and she didn’t have to live with him any more, and I said so to Aunt Jane. (He was a cross man, and very stern, as everybody knew.) But, dear suz me!  Aunt Jane was awfully shocked, and said certainly not; that she meant Mr. Darling had left his wife a great deal of money.

Then she talked very stern and solemn to me, and said that I must not think just because my poor dear father’s married life had ended in such a wretched tragedy that every other home had such a skeleton in the closet.

I grew stern and dignified and solemn then.  I knew, of course, what she meant.  I’m no child.  She meant Mother.  She meant that Mother, my dear blessed mother, was the skeleton in their closet.  And of course I wasn’t going to stand there and hear that, and not say a word.

But I didn’t say just a word.  I said a good many words.  I won’t try to put them all down here; but I told her quietly, in a firm voice, and with no temper (showing), that I guessed Father was just as much of a skeleton in Mother’s closet as she was in his; and that if she could see how perfectly happy my mother was now she’d understand a little of what my father’s skeleton had done to her all those years she’d had to live with it.

I said a lot more, but before I’d got half finished with what I wanted to say, I got to crying, so I just had to run out of the room.

That night I heard Aunt Jane tell Mrs. Darling that the worst feature of the whole deplorable situation was the effect on the child’s mind, and the wretched conception it gave her of the sacredness of the marriage tie, or something like that.  And Mrs. Darling sighed, and said, oh, and ah, and the pity of it.