“I feel that we ought not to refuse, Tom.  And I am afraid Eleanor is right.”

“Well, Mary, we’ve had her for seventeen years.  We ought to be willing to spare her for—­how many months?”

“Nine,” said Aunt Mary, promptly.  She had counted them.  “And Eleanor says she will be home for two weeks at Christmas.  Seventeen years!  It seems only yesterday when we brought her home, Tom.  It was just about this time of day, and she was asleep in your arms, and Bridget opened the door for us.”  Aunt Mary looked out of the window.  “And do you remember how she used to play under the maple there, with her dolls?”

Uncle Tom produced a very large handkerchief, and blew his nose.

“There, there, Mary,” he said, “nine months, and two weeks out at Christmas.  Nine months in eighteen years.”

“I suppose we ought to be very thankful,” said Aunt Mary.  “But, Tom, the time is coming soon—­”

“Tut tut,” exclaimed Uncle Tom.  He turned, and his eyes beheld a work of art.  Nothing less than a porcelain plate, hung in brackets on the wall, decorated by Honora at the age of ten with wild roses, and presented with much ceremony on an anniversary morning.  He pretended not to notice it, but Aunt Mary’s eyes were too quick.  She seized a photograph on her bureau, a photograph of Honora in a little white frock with a red sash.

“It was the year that was taken, Tom.”

He nodded.  The scene at the breakfast table came back to him, and the sight of Catherine standing respectfully in the hall, and of Honora, in the red sash, making the courtesy the old woman had taught her.

Honora recalled afterwards that Uncle Tom joked even more than usual that evening at dinner.  But it was Aunt Mary who asked her, at length, how she would like to go to boarding-school.  Such was the matter-of-fact manner in which the portentous news was announced.

“To boarding-school, Aunt Mary?”

Her aunt poured out her uncle’s after-dinner coffee.

“I’ve spilled some, my dear.  Get another saucer for your uncle.”

Honora went mechanically to the china closet, her heart thumping.  She did not stop to reflect that it was the rarest of occurrences for Aunt Mary to spill the coffee.

“Your Cousin Eleanor has invited you to go this winter with Edith and Mary to Sutcliffe.”

Sutcliffe!  No need to tell Honora what Sutcliffe was—­her cousins had talked of little else during the past winter; and shown, if the truth be told, just a little commiseration for Honora.  Sutcliffe was not only a famous girls’ school, Sutcliffe was the world—­that world which, since her earliest remembrances, she had been longing to see and know.  In a desperate attempt to realize what had happened to her, she found herself staring hard at the open china closet, at Aunt Mary’s best gold dinner set resting on the pink lace paper that had been changed only last week.  That dinner set, somehow, was always an augury of festival—­when, on the rare occasions Aunt Mary entertained, the little dining room was transformed by it and the Leffingwell silver into a glorified and altogether unrecognizable state, in which any miracle seemed possible.