I showed this note to my aunt, and soon went round, very much interested.  My latch-key opened the Lancasters’ door, and I hurried to the parlor, where I heard my friend practising with great diligence.  I went up to her, and she turned her head and kissed me solemnly.  You need not smile; we are not sentimental girls, and are both much averse to indiscriminate kissing, though I have not the adroit habit of shying in which Kate is proficient.  It would sometimes be impolite in any one else, but she shies so affectionately.

“Won’t you sit down, dear?” she said, with great ceremony, and went on with her playing, which was abominable that morning; her fingers stepped on each other, and, whatever the tune might have been in reality, it certainly had a most remarkable incoherence as I heard it then.  I took up the new Littell and made believe read it, and finally threw it at Kate; you would have thought we were two children.

“Have you heard that my grand-aunt, Miss Katharine Brandon of Deephaven, is dead?” I knew that she had died in November, at least six months before.

“Don’t be nonsensical, Kate!” said I.  “What is it you are going to tell me?”

“My grand-aunt died very old, and was the last of her generation.  She had a sister and three brothers, one of whom had the honor of being my grandfather.  Mamma is sole heir to the family estates in Deephaven, wharf-property and all, and it is a great inconvenience to her.  The house is a charming old house, and some of my ancestors who followed the sea brought home the greater part of its furnishings.  Miss Katharine was a person who ignored all frivolities, and her house was as sedate as herself.  I have been there but little, for when I was a child my aunt found no pleasure in the society of noisy children who upset her treasures, and when I was older she did not care to see strangers, and after I left school she grew more and more feeble; I had not been there for two years when she died.  Mamma went down very often.  The town is a quaint old place which has seen better days.  There are high rocks at the shore, and there is a beach, and there are woods inland, and hills, and there is the sea.  It might be dull in Deephaven for two young ladies who were fond of gay society and dependent upon excitement, I suppose; but for two little girls who were fond of each other and could play in the boats, and dig and build houses in the sea-sand, and gather shells, and carry their dolls wherever they went, what could be pleasanter?”

“Nothing,” said I, promptly.

Kate had told this a little at a time, with a few appropriate bars of music between, which suddenly reminded me of the story of a Chinese procession which I had read in one of Marryat’s novels when I was a child:  “A thousand white elephants richly caparisoned,—­ti-tum tilly-lily,” and so on, for a page or two.  She seemed to have finished her story for that time, and while it was dawning upon me what she meant, she sang a bit from one of Jean Ingelow’s verses:—­