“No.”

“Well, then, let’s run into grandma’s a minute.”

“All right,” said Ellen.

Mrs. Zelotes was sitting at her front window in the dusk, looking out on the street, as was her favorite custom.  The old woman seldom lit a lamp in the summer evening, but sat there staring out at the lighted street and the people passing and repassing, with her mind as absolutely passive as regarded herself as if she were travelling and observing only that which passed without.  At those times she became in a fashion sensible of the motion of the world, and lost her sense of individuality in the midst of it.  When her son and granddaughter entered she looked away from the window with the expression of one returning from afar, and seemed dazed for a moment.

“Hullo, mother!” said Andrew.

The room was dusky, and they moved across between the chairs and tables like two shadows.

“Oh, is it you, Andrew?” said his mother.  “Who is that with you—­Ellen?”

“Yes,” said Ellen.  “How do you do, grandma?”

Mrs. Zelotes became suddenly fully awake to the situation; she collected her scattered faculties; her keen old eyes gleamed in a shaft of electric-light from the street without, which fell full upon her face.

“Set down,” said she.  “Has the dressmaker gone?”

“No, she hadn’t when I came out,” replied Ellen, “but she’s most through for to-night.”

“How do your things look?”

“Real pretty, I guess.”

“Sometimes I think you’d better have had Miss Patch.  I hope she ’ain’t got your sleeves too tight at the elbows.”

“They seem to fit very nicely, grandma.”

“Sleeves are very particular things; a sleeve wrong can spoil a whole dress.”

Suddenly the old woman turned on Ellen with a look of extremest facetiousness and intelligence, and the girl winced, for she knew what was coming.  “I see you goin’ past with a young man last night, didn’t I?” said she.

Ellen flushed.  “Yes,” she said, almost indignantly, for she had a feeling as if the veil of some inner sacredness of her nature were continually being torn aside.  “I went over to Miss Lennox, to carry some sweet-peas, and Mr. Robert Lloyd was there, and he came home with me.”

“Oh!” replied her grandmother.

Ellen’s patience left her at the sound of that “Oh,” which seemed to rasp her very soul.  “You have none of you any right to talk and act as you do,” said she.  “You make me ashamed of you, you and mother; father has more sense.  Just because a young man makes me a call to return something, and then walks home with me, because he happened to be at the house where I call in the evening!  I think it’s a shame.  You make me feel as if I couldn’t look him in the face.”

“Never mind, grandma didn’t mean any harm,” Andrew said, soothingly.

“You needn’t try to excuse me, Andrew Brewster,” cried his mother, angrily.  “I guess it’s a pretty to-do, if I can’t say a word in joke to my own granddaughter.  If it had been a poor, good-for-nothing young feller workin’ in a shoe-factory, I s’pose she’d been tickled to death to be joked about him, but now when it begins to look as if somebody that was worth while had come along—­”