She brought out the last words very slowly, looking Aunt Elizabeth straight in the eyes, and Aunt Elizabeth looked back with her head very high.  She has a lovely way of using such expressions as “For the rest” and “As to that,” and she did it now.

“As to that,” she said, “my brother must speak for himself.  No one regrets more bitterly than I do this whole most unpleasant affair.  I can only say that with all my heart I am trying to straighten it out.”

Grandma Evarts sniffed just then so loudly that we all looked at her, and then, of course, mamma suddenly remembered that I was still there, regarding the scene with wide, intelligent young eyes, and she nodded toward the door, meaning for me to go out.  My, but I hated to!  I picked up grandma’s ball of wool and drew the footstool close to her feet, and looked around to see if I couldn’t show her some other delicate girlish attention such as old ladies love, but there wasn’t anything, especially as grandma kept motioning for me to leave.  So I walked toward the door very slowly, and before I got there I heard Tom Price say: 

“Oh, come now; we’re making a lot of fuss about nothing.  There’s a very simple way out of all this.  Alice says Goward’s still at the hotel.  I’ll just run down there and explain, and ask him to whom that letter belongs.”

Then I was at the door, and I had to open it and go out.  The voices went on inside for a few minutes, but soon I saw Tom come out and I went to him and slipped my arm inside of his and walked with him across the lawn and out to the sidewalk.  I don’t very often like the things Tom says, but I thought it was clever of him to think of going to ask Harry Goward about the letter, and I told him so to encourage him.  He thanked me very politely, and then he stopped and braced his back against the lamp-post on the corner and “fixed me with a stern gaze,” as writers say.

“Look here, Clarry,” he said ("Clarry” is short, he says, for Daily Bugle and Clarion Call, which is “too lengthy for frequent use"), “you’re doing a lot of mischief to-day with your rural delivery system for Goward and your news extras about Lorraine.  What’s this cock-and-bull story you’ve got up about her, anyway?”

I told him just what I had seen.  When I got through he said there was “nothing in it.”

“That bit about her head being among the toast and cake,” he went on, “would be convincing circumstantial evidence of a tragedy if it had been any other woman’s head, but it doesn’t count with Lorraine—­I mean it doesn’t represent the complete abandonment to grief which would be implied if it happened in the case of any one else.  You must remember that when Lorraine wants to have a comfortable cry she’s got to choose between putting her head in the jam on the sofa, or among the wet paint and brushes in the easy-chair, or among the crumbs on the tea-table.  As for that photograph, it probably fell off the mantel-piece to the tea-table,