“Upon my word, I would not have recognized you,” she said, sitting down upon the bed and looking Ethie fully in the face.

Aunt Barbara, thinking her sister might like to have Ethie alone for a little, had purposely left the room, and so Mrs. Van Buren was free to say what she pleased.  She had felt a good deal of irritation toward Ethie for some time past.  In fact, ever since Richard became governor, she had blamed her niece for running away from the honor which might have been hers.  As aunt to the governor’s lady, she, too, would have come in for a share of the eclat; and so, as she smoothed out the folds of her stone-colored merino, she felt as if she had been sorely aggrieved by that thin, white-faced woman, who really did not greatly resemble the rosy, bright-faced Ethelyn to whom Frank Van Buren had once talked love among the Chicopee hills.

“No, I don’t believe I should have known you,” Mrs. Van Buren continued.  “What have you been about to fade you so?”

Few women like to hear that they have faded, even if they know it to be true, and Ethie’s cheek flushed a little as she asked, with a smile, “Am I really such a fright?”

“Why, no, not a fright!  No one with the Bigelow features can ever be that.  But you are changed; and so I am sure Richard would think.  He liked beautiful girls.  You know he has been governor?”

Ethie nodded, and Mrs. Van Buren continued:  “You lost a great deal, Ethelyn, when you went away; and I must say that, though, of course, you had great provocation, you did a very foolish thing leaving your husband as you did, and involving us all, to a certain extent, in disgrace.”

It was the first direct intimation Ethie had received that her family had suffered from mortification on her account.  She had felt that they must, and knew that she deserved some censure; but as kind Aunt Barbara had withheld it, she was not quite willing to hear it from Mrs. Van Buren, and for an instant her eyes flashed, and a hot reply trembled on her lips; but she restrained herself and merely said:  “I am sorry if I disgraced you, Aunt Sophia.  I was very unhappy at the time,”

“Certainly; I understand that, but the world does not; and if it did, it forgot all when your husband became governor.  He was greatly honored and esteemed, I hear from a friend who spent a few weeks at Des Moines, and everybody was so sorry for him.”

“Did they talk of me?” Ethie asked, repenting the next minute that she had been at all curious in the matter.

Mrs. Van Buren, bent upon annoying her, replied, “Some, yes; and knowing the governor as they did, it is natural they should blame you more than him.  There was a rumor of his getting a divorce, but my friends did not believe it and neither do I, though divorces are easy to get out West.  Have you written to him?  Are you not ’most afraid he will think you came back because he has been governor?”