The cart drew up beside steps leading to a wide porch shaded by a striped awning.

“Home at last,” cooed Miss Juliana with false welcome.

A loutish person promptly abandoned a lawn mower in the near distance and came to stand by the head of the languid pony.  He grinned horribly, and winked as the two figures descended from the rear of the cart.  For a moment, halting on the first of the steps, the Wilbur twin became aware that just beyond him, almost to be grasped, was a veritable rainbow curved above a whirling lawn sprinkler.  And he had learned that a rainbow is a thing of gracious promise.  But probably they have to be natural rainbows; probably you don’t get anything out of one you make yourself.  Even as he looked, the shining omen vanished, somewhere shut off by an unseen power.

“This way, please,” called Miss Juliana, cordially, and he followed her guiltily up the steps to the shaded porch.

The girl had preceded her.  The Merle twin lingered back of them, shocked, austere, deprecating, and yet somehow bland withal, as if these little affairs were not without their compensating features.

The bowed Wilbur twin was startled by a gusty torrent of laughter.  With torturing effort, he raised his eyes to a couple of elderly male Whipples.  One sat erect on a cushioned bench, and one had lain at ease in a long, low thing of wicker.  It was this one who made the ill-timed and tasteless demonstration that was still continuing.  Ultimately the creature lost all tone from his laughter.  It went on, soundless but uncannily poignant.  Such was the effect that the Wilbur twin wondered if his own ears had been suddenly deafened.  This Whipple continued to shake silently.  The other, who had not laughed, whose face seemed ill-modelled for laughing, nevertheless turned sparkling eyes from under shelving brows upon Juliana and said in words stressed with emotion:  “My dear, you have brightened my whole day.”

The first Whipple, now recovered from his unseemly paroxysm, sat erect to study the newcomers in detail.  He was a short, round-chested man with a round moon face marked by heavy brows like those of the other.  He had fat wrists and stout, blunt fingers.  With a stubby thumb he now pushed up the outer ends of the heavy brows as if to heighten the power of his vision for this cherished spectacle.

“I seem to recognize the lad,” he murmured as if in privacy to his own hairy ears.  “Surely I’ve seen the rascal about the place, perhaps helping Nathan at the stable; but that lovely little girl—­I’ve not had the pleasure of meeting her before.  Come, sissy”—­he held out blandishing arms—­“come here, Totte, and give the old man a kiss.”

Could hate destroy, these had been the dying words of Sharon Whipple.  But the Wilbur twin could manage only a sidelong glare insufficient to slay.  His brother giggled until he saw that he made merry alone.

“What?  Bless my soul, the minx is sulky!” roared the wit.