The next morning Miss Betsey was sitting in her hop-vine-covered porch, shelling peas for her early dinner, and thinking of Archie and the painted Jezebel, as she designated Daisy, when a shadow fell upon the floor, and looking up she saw the subject of her thoughts standing before her, with her yellow hair arranged low in her neck, and a round black hat set coquettishly upon her head.  Miss Betsey did not manifest the least surprise, but adjusting her spectacles from her forehead to her eyes, looked up inquiringly at her visitor, who, seating herself upon the threshold of the door, took off her hat, and in the silvery tones she could assume so well, said: 

“You must excuse me, dear auntie.  I could not wait for you to call, I wanted to see you so badly, and, as Allen Browne was going to the post-office, I rode down with him, I am Daisy—­Archie’s wife, or widow, for Archie is dead, you know.”

She said this very sadly and low, and there were great tears in the blue eyes lifted timidly and appealingly to the little sharp, bead like eyes confronting her so steadily through the spectacles.  How very lovely and youthful-looking she was as she sat there in the doorway, and Miss Betsey acknowledged the youth and the loveliness, but did not unbend one whit.

“Ahem!” she began, and the tone was not very reassuring “I knew you were here.  Mrs. Browne told me, and I saw you there with Allen yesterday.  I saw you years ago on the terrace at Aberystwyth, and remembered you well.  Was Archie very sick when you left him?”

“Yes—­no,” Daisy said, stammeringly; “that is, he had been sick a long time, but I did not think him so bad or I should never have left him.  Oh, auntie, it almost killed me when I heard he was dead, and there is a moan for him in my heart all the time.”

She adopted this form of speech because it had sounded prettily to herself when she said it to Mrs. Browne, who had believed in the moan, but Miss Betsey did not.

“Ahem!” she said; “how much time have you spent with Archie the last ten years or so?”

“Not as much as I wish I had now.  I was obliged to be away from him,” Daisy replied, and the spinster continued: 

“Why?”

“My health was poor, and I was so much better out of England; and so, when people invited me, I went with them—­it saved expense at home, and we are so poor, oh! you cannot know how poor;” and Daisy clasped her hands together despairingly as she gazed up at the stern face above her, which did not relax in its sternness, but remained so hard and stony that Daisy burst out impetuously:  “Oh, auntie, why are you so cold to me.  Why do you hate me so?  I have never harmed you.  I want you for my friend—­mine and Bessie’s; and we need a friend so much in our loneliness and poverty.  Bessie is the sweetest, truest girl you ever knew.”

For a moment Miss Betsey’s hands moved rapidly among the pea-pods; then removing her spectacles and wiping them with the corner of her apron, she began: