“I am wearing my hat,” answered Ariel, “because at any moment I may decide to go for a long walk!”

“Oh, I hope not,” said Mamie.  “There are sure to be people:  a few still come, even though I’m an engaged girl.  I expect that’s just to console me, though,” she added, smiling over this worn quip of the betrothed, and shaking her head at Eugene, who grew red and coughed.  “There’ll be plenty to-day, but they won’t be here to see me.  It’s you, Ariel, and they’d be terribly disappointed if you weren’t here.  I shouldn’t wonder if the whole town came; it’s curious enough about you!”

Canaan (at least that part of it which Mamie meant when she said “the whole town”) already offered testimony to her truthfulness.  Two gentlemen, aged nine and eleven, and clad in white “sailor suits,” were at that moment grooving their cheeks between the round pickets of the gate.  They had come from the house across the street, evidently stimulated by the conversation at their own recent dinner-table (they wore a few deposits such as are left by chocolate-cake), and the motive of their conduct became obvious when, upon being joined by a person from next door (a starched and frilled person of the opposite sex but sympathetic age), one of them waggled a forefinger through the gate at Ariel, and a voice was heard in explanation: 

“That’s her.”

There was a rustle in the lilac-bushes near the cedar-tree; the three small heads turned simultaneously in that direction; something terrific was evidently seen, and with a horrified “OOOH!” the trio skedaddled headlong.

They were but the gay vanguard of the life which the street, quite dead through the Sunday dinner-hour, presently took on.  Young couples with their progeny began to appear, returning from the weekly reunion Sunday dinner with relatives; young people meditative (until they reached the Pike Mansion), the wives fanning themselves or shooing the tots-able-to-walk ahead of them, while the husbands, wearing long coats, satin ties, and showing dust upon their blazing shoes, invariably pushed the perambulators.  Most of these passers-by exchanged greetings with Mamie and Eugene, and all of them looked hard at Ariel as long as it was possible.

And now the young men of the town, laboriously arranged as to apparel, began to appear on the street in small squads, making their Sunday rounds; the youngest working in phalanxes of threes and fours, those somewhat older inclining to move in pairs; the eldest, such as were now beginning to be considered middle-aged beaux, or (by the extremely youthful) “old bachelors,” evidently considered it advantageous to travel alone.  Of all these, there were few who did not, before evening fell, turn in at the gate of the Pike Mansion.  Consciously, shyly or confidently, according to the condition of their souls, they made their way between the cast-iron deer to be presented to the visitor.