Now for Mrs. Hollister’s plan.  She suddenly conceived the idea of inviting Aunt Susan on for a visit, supposedly to give Grandmother a chance to see her only sister once more, but in reality to have Ethel ingratiate herself with the old lady, thereby causing her to leave the girl the bulk of her fortune.  Ethel read between the lines and at first refused, but after listening to her mother for a while and thinking perhaps she was right, she allowed herself to promise to further the plan.

Aunt Susan was a woman with fine eyes and teeth, as well as a charming manner, but her style of dressing dated back to the eighties—­full skirts, flat hats with strings, beaded plush dolmans, etc.  Ethel was ashamed to be seen with her but she had promised to help and she had to do her share.  In the meanwhile her mother had spread the report that Aunt Susan was a millionaire and that Ethel was to have her fortune at her death.  Everyone fell in love with Aunt Susan and ascribed her peculiar dressing to the eccentricities of a wealthy woman.

Mrs. Hollister’s joy knew no bounds when Aunt Susan invited Ethel to return with her to Akron.  Her scheme was beginning to work.  Ethel was a lovely girl.  Aunt Susan would grow fond of her and the fortune was assured.  Besides, as it would cost a small fortune to take Ethel to a fashionable summer resort, Mrs. Archie could save money for the winter.  But, accompanying the invitation, Aunt Susan requested that during July and August, Ethel might join her other grand niece’s “Camp Fires” and live in the woods.  “It will be the making of your girl,” she added, “as now she looks thin and peaked.”

At first Mrs. Archie indignantly refused.  She almost felt that she had been trapped, but Aunt Susan met every objection and even told the lady that she feared she was shallow and an unnatural mother to refuse to consider her daughter’s health.  Mrs. Archie dared not let Aunt Susan know that she considered the whole organization conspicuous and common, nor that she did not wish Ethel to learn to do the work of a servant, etc., or run the risk of meeting girls of humble origin.  So after some sharp rebukes administered to her by the old lady on the sin of worldliness and the fact that she was not doing a mother’s duty by her daughter, she consented, mentally declaring that she would see that Ethel should forget all about it on her return.

While visiting Aunt Susan and living in Camp in a truthful atmosphere Ethel Hollister began to change.  She saw how the old lady was beloved.  She heard on every side of the good she had done, and when one day Aunt Susan told her that she had been a wife and mother, and what she had suffered at the hands of a brutal husband, she was spellbound.  For years she had been deserted, but when one day he was supposed to be dying she was sent for that he might beg her forgiveness.  She went and found that for four years he had been stone blind and that he had sunk so low that she shrank from the squalid house in which he was living.  She took him away and stayed with him until his death, making the last days of his life more bearable.