to decide at once, as he couldn’t stay a minute later than the 30th.  They could be married anywhere she said, only it must be quickly done.  He had gotten the telegram an hour before, and in the morning she must get Kitty Canary to fix things so he could see her and talk more fully.  Kitty could be depended on and would manage somehow.  The rest being private and personal, I skipped it and gave the note back to Amy, who was as white as the dress she had on, and her hands as limp as wet kid gloves.

Excited!  To my dying day I will never forget the thrill of it.  Being in love myself, as I had once thought, wasn’t a circumstance to it, and the other girls were as bad as I. To help a heart-yearning, backboneless young girl escape from the captivity of a cast-iron grandparent was something no red-blooded person could refuse, and every one of us agreed that the only thing for Amy to do was to walk into the den of lions and tell the head lioness the truth; ask her permission to many the man she loved, and, if she would not give it, to take it, anyhow, and tell her farewell and leave at once for South America.  That, at least, was what I thought ought to be done, and after a while the others thought so, too.  At first there was a lot of argument, but I told them I would never agree to Amy’s running away to be married without her first telling her grandmother she was going to do it.  That is, if she would not let her be married at home.  If the G. M. would not let, then Amy could take the first train out, but she mustn’t take it until she had shown her grandmother the respect she did not deserve.  I never could bear runaway marriages.  There’s always something so common about them, and I wasn’t going to be party to one if I could help it.

All the time we were talking we left Amy out of it, and never once asked her what she preferred in the matter.  The reason we didn’t was the poor little thing was so frightened and distressed that she could not open her lips.  We would not let her come down-stairs with us, and when we said good night I whispered that I would see Taylor on my way to Rose Hill, and at ten o’clock the next morning we would meet her at the back of Miss Susanna’s vegetable garden under the big locust-tree, and that she mustn’t worry, we’d fix it, he and I. Also I told her she might bring up some toilet things and little traveling necessities and leave them with me; and though she clung to me like a frightened child and didn’t speak, she was down by the barn the next morning at ten, and so was Taylor.  I let them get there a little ahead of me.

CHAPTER XXVI