Miss Patty frowned.

“You are not going to marry him,” she said, with a glance at Mr. Dick, who, with his coat off, was lying flat on the floor, one arm down in the hole where the things had been hidden, trying to hook up a can of baked beans.  “If it doesn’t turn out well, you and father have certainly done your part in the way of warning.  It’s just as Aunt Honoria said; the family will make a tremendous row beforehand, but afterward, when it all turns out well, they’ll take the credit.”

Mr. Dick was busy with the beans and I was turning the eggs.  Mrs. Dick went over to her sister and put her arm around her.

“That’s right, Patty,” she said, “you’re more like mother than I am.  I’m a Jennings all over—­except that, heavens be praised, I’ve got the Sherwood liver.  I guess I’m common plebeian, like dad, too.  I’m plebeian enough, anyhow, to think there’s been a lot too much about marriage settlements and the consent of the emperor in all this, and not enough about love.”

I could have patted Mrs. Dicky on the back for that, and I almost upset the eggs into the fire.  I’m an advocate of marrying for love every time, although a title and a bunch of family jewels thrown in wouldn’t worry me.

“Do you want me to protest that the man who has asked me to marry him cares about me?” Miss Patty replied in an angry undertone.  “Couldn’t he have married a thousand other girls!  Hadn’t a marriage been arranged between him and the cousin—­”

“I know all that,” Mrs. Dicky said, and her voice sounded older than Miss Patty’s, and motherly.  “But—­are you in love with him, Pat?”

“Certainly,” Miss Patty said indignantly.  “Don’t be silly, Dolly.”

At that instant Mr. Dick found the beans, and got up shouting that we’d have a meal fit for a prince—­if princes ate anything so every day as baked beans.  I put the eggs on a platter and poured the coffee, and we all sat around the soap box and ate.  I wished that Miss Cobb could have seen me there—­how they insisted on my having a second egg, and was my coffee cold, and wasn’t I too close to the fire?  It was Minnie here and Minnie there, and me next to Miss Patty on the floor, and she, as you may say, right next to royalty.  I wished it could have been in the spring-house, with father’s crayon enlargement looking down on us.

Everybody felt better for the meal, and we were sitting there laughing and talking and very cheerful when Mr. Van Alstyne opened the door and looked in.  His face was stern, but when he saw us, with Miss Patty on her knees toasting a piece of bread and Mr. Dicky passing the tin basin as a finger-bowl, he stopped scowling and looked amused.

“They’re here, Sallie,” he called to his wife, and they both came in, covered with snow, and we had coffee and eggs all over again.

Well, they stayed for an hour, and Mr. Sam talked himself black in the face and couldn’t get anywhere.  For the Dickys refused to be separated, and Mrs. Dick wouldn’t tell her father, and Miss Patty wouldn’t do it for her, and the minute Mr. Sam made a suggestion that sounded rational Mrs. Dick would cry and say she didn’t care to live, anyhow, and she wished she had died of ptomaine poisoning the time she ate the bad oysters at school.