“Flora, Flora, where be you?” Mrs. Maxwell called out in the entry.

They heard her climbing the chamber stairs; but she soon came into the parlor with a little glass of currant wine.

“Here, you’d better drink this right down,” she said to Lois; “it won’t hurt you.  I don’t see where Flora is, for my part.  She ain’t upstairs.  Drink it right down.”

Lois drank the little glass of wine without any demur.  Her mother glanced sharply at the album as she took it.

“I can’t imagine where Flora is,” said Mrs. Maxwell.

“I saw somebody go out of the yard a while ago,” said Lois.

“You did?  Was she kind of stout with light hair?”

“Yes, ’m.”

“It was Flora then.  I don’t see where she’s gone.  Mebbe she went down to the store to get some more thread for her tidy.  Now I guess you’ll feel better.”

“Who’s this a picture of?” asked Mrs. Field.

“Hold it up.  Oh, that’s Mis’ John Robbins!  She’s dead.  Yes, I guess Flora must have gone after that thread.  She’ll show you how to make that tidy, Lois, if you want to learn; it’s real handsome.  I guess she’ll be here before long.”

But when Mrs. Maxwell had shown her guests all the photographs in the album and a book of views in Palestine, and it was nearly four o’clock, Flora still had not come.

“Do you see anybody comin’?” Mrs. Maxwell kept asking Lois at the window.

Before Mrs. Maxwell spoke, a nervous vibration seemed to seize upon her whole body.  She cleared her throat sharply.  It was like a premonitory click of machinery before motion, and Lois waited, numb with fear, for what she might say.  Suppose she should suddenly suspect, and should cry out, “Is this woman here Esther Maxwell?”

But all Mrs. Maxwell’s thoughts were on her absent daughter.  “I don’t see where she is,” said she.  “Here she’s got to make cream-tarter biscuits for tea, an’ it’s ’most time for the folks to come.”

“I’m afraid we came too early,” said Mrs. Field.

“Oh, no, you didn’t,” returned Mrs. Maxwell politely.  “It ain’t half as pleasant goin’ as late as they do here when they’re asked out to tea.  You don’t see anything of ’em; they begin to eat jest as soon as they come, an’ it seems as if that was all they come for.  The old-fashioned way of goin’ right after dinner, an’ takin’ your sewin’s, a good deal better, accordin’ to my way of thinkin’, but they ain’t done so for years here.  Elliot is a pretty fashionable place.  I s’pose it must be very different up in Green River, where you come from?”

“Yes, I guess ’tis,” said Mrs. Field.

The front gate clicked, and Mrs. Maxwell peered cautiously around a lace curtain.  Two ladies in their best black dresses came up the walk, stepping with a pleasant ceremony.

“There’s Mis’ Isaac Robbins an’ Ann ’Liza White,” Mrs. Maxwell whispered agitatedly.  “I shall have to go right out in the kitchen an’ make them biscuits the minute they get here.  I don’t see what Flora Maxwell is thinkin’ of.”