“Oh, Lord, so we were!  Well, let’s not!” Emily would yawn.

“But, Em, they expect us!”

“Well, go telephone, Sue, there’s a dear!  And tell them I’ve got a terrible headache.  And you and I’ll have tea up here.  Tell Carrie I want to see her about it; I’m hungry; I want to order it specially.”

Sometimes, when the girls came downstairs, dressed for some outing, it was Miss Ella who upset their plans.  Approving of her little sister’s appearance, she would lure Emily off for a round of formal calls.

“Be decent now, Baby!  You’ll never have a good time, if you don’t go and do the correct thing now and then.  Come on.  I’m going to town on the two, and we can get a carriage right at the ferry—­”

But Susan rarely managed to save the afternoon.  Going noiselessly upstairs, she was almost always captured by the lonely old mistress of the house.

“Girls gone?” Mrs. Saunders would pipe, in her cracked little voice, from the doorway of her rooms.  “Don’t the house seem still?  Come in, Susan, you and I’ll console each other over a cup of tea.”

Susan, smilingly following her, would be at a loss to account for her own distaste and disappointment.  But she was so tired of people!  She wanted so desperately to be alone!

The precious chance would drift by, a rich tea would presently be served; the little over-dressed, over-fed old lady was really very lonely; she went to a luncheon or card-party not oftener than two or three times a month, and she loved company.  There was almost no close human need or interest in her life; she was as far from her children as was any other old lady of their acquaintance.

Susan knew that she had been very proud of her sons and daughters, as a happy young mother.  The girl was continually discovering, among old Mrs. Saunders’ treasures, large pictures of Ella, at five, at seven, at nine, with straight long bangs and rosetted hats that tied under her chin, and French dresses tied with sashes about her knees, and pictures of Kenneth leaning against stone benches, or sitting in swings, a thin and sickly-looking little boy, in a velvet suit and ribboned straw hat.  There were pictures of the dead children, too, and a picture of Emily, at three months, sitting in an immense shell, and clad only in the folds of her own fat little person.  On the backs of these pictures, Mrs. Saunders had written “Kennie, six years old,” and the date, or “Totty, aged nine”—­she never tired of looking at them now, and of telling Susan that the buttons on Ella’s dress had been of sterling silver, “made right from Papa’s mine,” and that the little ship Kenneth held had cost twenty-five dollars.  All of her conversation was boastful, in an inoffensive, faded sort of way.  She told Susan about her wedding, about her gown and her mother’s gown, and the cost of her music, and the number of the musicians.