Josephine shook her head, but her mother replied in a quiet tone of conviction:  “I doubt if the daughter of that family will be anything but a simple-mannered girl, no matter how experienced she may be in foreign usages.”

Sally nodded.  “So I’m hoping.  But ’Miss Carew’—­with a voice—­sounds more formidable.  It’s for Miss Carew I’m going to have afternoon tea.  I’ll go out now and make my little cakes.  And I’ll have very, very thin bread and butter.  I’ve just one cherished jar of the choicest Orange Pekoe, so the tea will be above reproach.  And my one pride is my linen—­you know how much mother always kept—­not only her own but Grandmother Rudd’s.”  Then she vanished, quite suddenly, from the doorway, as if, having once mentioned the mother of whom she seldom spoke, she could not come back again to other subjects until a period of silence had intervened.

“I’m so anxious to see her put away the black clothes,” said Josephine to her mother.  “It will be good for her to wear the lilac muslin, for now she’s made it she can’t bring herself to put it on, though she knows how we all want to see her in colours again.  Speaking of colours—­Jarvis said this morning that by the fence in the south meadow the grass was blue with wild violets.  I believe I’ll go and pick a big bunch for Sally’s tea-table.”

“It seems rather early for tea on the lawn,” suggested Mrs. Burnside, “though I couldn’t bear to damp Sally’s ardour by saying so.”

“Oh, it’s really very warm, and the lawn seems quite dry.  I don’t blame Sally for wanting to show off the ‘ancestral oaks.’  It’s almost like June.”

But—­alas for plans which count upon the most June-like May weather—­no guests were served with afternoon tea that day except under a roof more substantial than the low-hanging boughs of the great oaks.  At mid-afternoon, treacherously enough, the sky showed not a cloud, except over beyond the timber lot, where they had risen to some height before they could be discerned from the lawn.  There Sally, lilac-clad, was laying her fine linen cloth, setting out her thin teacups of the old gold-banded china, and arranging Josephine’s blue meadow-violets in a curious, engraved glass bowl of Grandmother Rudd’s.  A small gust of wind, lifting the edges of the heavy damask cloth and nearly capsizing the violets, first called her attention to a change in the weather.  Uncle Timothy, bringing out chairs at her behest, paused and scanned the horizon with an experienced eye.

“Looks a little dubious to me, Sally,” he observed, although he came on with his chairs.  “Company due pretty soon?”

“It’s four o’clock—­they’ll come very soon, for I sent word that we’d have tea early on account of its growing cool after five.  Yes—­there is a little bit of a dark cloud in the south beyond the woods, but you don’t think it will bring rain right away, do you?”

“If it begins to blow, it will—­look out, there—­” for another brisk little zephyr lifted the corner of the tea-table cloth again, and threatened the teacups.  “Weather changes pretty suddenly sometimes, in May.”