I sat there on the piazza watching him, thinking he’d been awfully good to me, and feeling less bruised, somehow, than I do when the rest of the family advise me—­except mother!  And I saw him stop, turn round as if he were coming back, and then settle himself and plant his feet wide apart, as he does when the family question him about business.  Then I saw somebody in light blue through the trees, and I knew it was Aunt Elizabeth.  Alice was down in the hammock reading and eating cookies, and she saw her, too.  Alice threw the book away and got her long legs out of the hammock and ran.  I thought she was coming into the house to hide from Aunt Elizabeth.  That’s what we all do the first minute, and then we recover ourselves and go down and meet her.  But Alice dropped on her knees by my chair and threw her arms round me.

“Forgive, Peggy,” she moaned.  “Oh, forgive!”

I saw she had on my fraternity pin, and I thought she meant that.  So I said, “You can wear it today”; but she only hugged me the tighter and ran on in a rigmarole I didn’t understand.

“She’s coming, and she’ll get it out of Lorraine, and they’ll all be down on us.”

Charles Edward and Aunt Elizabeth stood talking together, and just then I saw her put her hand on his shoulder.

“She’s trying to come round him,” said Alice.

I began to see she was really in earnest now.  “He’s squirming.  Oh, Peggy, maybe she’s found it out some way, and she’s telling him, and they’ll tell you, and you’ll think I am false as hell!”

I knew she didn’t mean anything by that word, because whenever she says such things they’re always quotations.  She began to cry real tears.

“It was Billy put it into my head,” said she, “and Lorraine put it into his.  Lorraine wanted him to write out exactly what he knew, and he didn’t know anything except about the telegram and how the letter got wuzzled, and I told him I’d help him write it as it ought to be ’if life were a banquet and beauty were wine’; but I told him we must make him say in it how he’d got to conceal it from me, or they’d think we got it up together.  So I wrote it,” said Alice, “and Billy copied it.”

Perhaps I wasn’t nice to the child, for I couldn’t listen to her.  I was watching Charles Edward and Aunt Elizabeth, and saying to myself that mother’d want me to sit still and meet Aunt Elizabeth when she came—­“like a good girl,” as she used to say to me when I was little and begged to get out of hard things.  Alice went on talking and gasping.

“Peg,” she said, “he’s perfectly splendid—­Dr. Denbigh is.”

“Yes, dear,” said I, “he’s very nice.”

“I’ve adored him for years,” said Alice.  “I could trust him with my whole future.  I could trust him with yours.”