“It is an idiosyncrasy of Aunt Frances,” Helena explained, with the grandest phrase she could pick out of her “Synonymes,” to cow down those who “wondered.”

Privately, Helena held long lamentations with Hazel, going to and fro, about the party that she could not have.

“I’m actually ashamed to go to school.  There isn’t a girl there, who can pretend to have anything, that hasn’t had some kind of a company this winter.  I’ve been to them all, and I feel real mean,—­sneaky.  What’s ‘next year?’ Mamma puts me off with that.  Poh?  Next year they’ll all begin again.  You can’t skip birthdays.”

“I’ll tell you what!” said Hazel, suddenly, inspired by much the same idea that had occurred to Mrs. Ripwinkley; “I mean to ask my mother to let me have a party!”

“You!  Down in Aspen Street!  Don’t, for pity’s sake, Hazel!”

“I don’t believe but what it could be done over again!” said Hazel, irrelevantly, intent upon her own thought.

“It couldn’t be done once!  For gracious grandmother’s sake, don’t think of it!” cried the little world-woman of thirteen.

“It’s gracious grandmother’s sake that made me think of it,” said Hazel, laughing.  “The way she used to do.”

“Why don’t you ask them to help you hunt up old Noah, and all get back into the ark, pigeons and all?”

“Well, I guess they had pretty nice times there, any how; and if another big rain comes, perhaps they’ll have to!”

Hazel did not intend her full meaning; but there is many a faint, small prophecy hid under a clover-leaf.

Hazel did not let go things; her little witch-wand, once pointed, held its divining angle with the might of magic until somebody broke ground.

“It’s awful!” Helena declared to her mother and sisters, with tears of consternation.  “And she wants me to go round with her and carry ‘compliments!’ It’ll never be got over,—­never!  I wish I could go away to boarding-school!”

For Mrs. Ripwinkley had made up her unsophisticated mind to try this thing; to put this grain of a pure, potent salt, right into the seethe and glitter of little Boston, and find out what it would decompose or precipitate.  For was not she a mother, testing the world’s chalice for her children?  What did she care for the hiss and the bubble, if they came?

She was wider awake than Mrs. Ledwith knew; perhaps they who come down from the mountain heights of long seclusion can measure the world’s paces and changes better than they who have been hurried in the midst of them, on and on, or round and round.

Worst of all, old Uncle Titus took it up.

It was funny,—­or it would have been funny, reader, if anybody but you and I and Rachel Froke knew exactly how,—­to watch Uncle Titus as he kept his quiet eye on all these things,—­the things that he had set going,—­and read their revelations; sheltered, disguised, under a character that the world had chosen to put upon him, like Haroun Alraschid in the merchant’s cloak.