Yet—­and this it was that was making Winona old before her time—­always in her secret heart of hearts she did long abjectly to wear silk stockings—­all manner of sinful silken trifles.  Evil yearnings like this would sweep her.  But she took them to be fruits of a natural depravity that good women must fight.  Thus far she had triumphed.

Mrs. Penniman now wielded the palm-leaf fan.  She eyed her husband with an almost hardened glance, then ran a professional eye over the lines of Winona.  Her head moved with quick little birdlike turnings.  Her dark hair was less orderly than Winona’s, and—­from her kitchen work—­two spots of colour burned high on her cheeks.

“Your locket’s slipped inside your waist,” she said, not dreaming that Winona had in shame brought this about.

Winona, who would have been shamed again to explain this, withdrew the bauble.  The fond mother now observed the book above which her daughter bent, twisting her neck to follow the title.

“Is it interesting?” she asked; and then:  “The way to know a man—­cook for him.”

Her daughter winced, suffering a swift picture of her too-light mother, cooking for Mr. Arnold.

“I should think you’d pick out a good novel to read,” went on her mother.  “That last one I got from the library—­it’s about a beautiful woman that counted the world well lost for love.”

Winona murmured indistinctly.

“She didn’t—­she didn’t stop at anything,” added the mother, brightly.

“Oh, Mother!”

“I don’t care!  The Reverend Mallett himself said that novels should be read for an understanding of life—­ever novels with a wholesome sex interest.  The very words he said!”

“Mother, Mother!” protested Winona with a quick glance at her father.

She doubted if any sex interest could be wholesome; and surely, with both sexes present, the less said about such things the better.  To her relief the perilous topic was abandoned.

“I suppose you both heard the big news today.”

Mrs. Penniman spoke ingenuously, but it was downright lying—­no less.  She supposed they had not heard the big news.  She was certain they had not.  Winona was attentive.  Her mother’s business of plain and fancy dressmaking did not a little to make the acoustics of Newbern superior.  From her clients she gleaned the freshest chronicles of Newbern’s social life, many being such as one might safely repeat; many more, Winona uncomfortably recalled, the sort no good woman would let go any further.  She hoped the imminent disclosure would not be of the latter class, yet suddenly she wished to hear it even if it were.  She affected to turn with reluctance from her budding acquaintanceship with Matthew Arnold.

“It’s the twins,” began her mother with a look of pleased horror.  “You couldn’t guess in all day what they’ve been up to.”

“You may be sure Wilbur was the one to blame,” put in Winona, quick to defend the one most responsive to her lessons in faith, morals, etiquette.