“That would be lovely, Aunt Augusta, and how are you?” I answered and asked in the same breath, as I drew near enough to her to receive a business-like peck on my cheek.  “I expect to have you and Uncle Peter to look after me a lot, but somehow I feel that Father would have liked—­liked for me to live here and keep my home—­his home—­open.  Some way will arrange itself.  I haven’t talked with Cousin James yet,” I felt white feathers sprouting all over me, as I thus invoked the masculine dominance I had come to lay.

“You’ll have to settle that matter with your Uncle Peter, then, for, following his dictates of which I did not approve, I have done our duty by the orphan.  Now, Evelina, let me say in my own person, that I thoroughly approve of your doing just as you plan.”  And as she uttered this heresy, she looked so straight and militant and altogether commanding, that both Cousin Martha and Sallie quailed.  I felt elated, as if my soul were about to get sight of a kindred personality.  Or rather a soul-relative of yours, Jane.

“Oh, she would be so lonely, Mrs. Shelby, and she—­” Sallie was venturing to say with trepidation, when Aunt Augusta cut her short without ceremony.

“Lonely, nonsense!  Such a busy woman as I now feel sure Evelina is going to be, will not have time to be lonely.  I wish I could stay and talk with you further about your plans, but I must hurry back and straighten out Peter’s mind on that question of the town water-supply that is to come up in the meeting of the City Council to-day.  He let it be presented all wrong last time, and they got things so muddled that it was voted on incorrectly.  I will have to write it out for him so he can explain it to them.  I will need you in many ways to help me help Peter be Mayor of Glendale, Evelina.  I am wearied after ten years of the strain of his office.  I shall call on you for assistance often in the most important matters,” with which promise, that sounded like a threat, she proceeded to march down the front path, almost stepping on Henrietta, who was coming up the same path, with almost the same emphasis.  There was some sort of an explosion, and I hope the kind of words I heard hurled after the train were not used.

“That old black crow is a-going to git in trouble with me some day, Marfy,” Henrietta remarked, as she settled herself on the arm of Cousin Martha’s chair, after bestowing a smudgy kiss on the little white curl that wrapped around one of the dear old lady’s pink little ears.  I had felt that way about Cousin Martha myself at the Bunch’s age, and we exchanged a sympathetic smile on the subject.

“Well, what are you going to do, Evelina?” asked Sallie, and she turned such a young, helpless, wondering face up to me from the center of her cluster of babies, that my heart almost failed me at the idea of pouring what seemed to me at that moment the poison of modernity into the calm waters of her and Cousin Martha’s primitive placidity.