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m the upper hall.
"She won't send her regrets. She says she's going. I tell her they
will ask her another time, but she insists she feels lots better and
was thinking of getting up, anyway. She wants to start putting fresh
cuffs on her black cashmere this minute, and do I don't know what.
You'd better come up and stop her."
But Celestina was not to be stopped. Go she would!
"My shoulder's 'most well anyhow," she affirmed, "an' I had planned to
go down to supper. Do you think for one minute I'd miss a junket like
this? Why, I'd go if it killed me! The Galbraiths are nice folks an'
have been good to Bob and Willie. Besides," she added with
ingratiating candor, "I want to see where they live. An' they're goin'
to send the automobile for us, that great red one--imagine it! I ain't
been in an automobile more'n six times in my whole life. Do you think
I'd send my regrets? I'd go if I had to be carried on a stretcher!"
Delight and Robert Morton laughed at her enthusiasm.
"Now you trot straight down stairs, Bob," went on Celestina
energetically, "an' write Mis' Lee we'll admire to come, all of us."
"But Aunt Tiny," put in Delight, "I'm not going. Somebody must stay
here and look after the house."
"What for?" Celestina demanded. "The house won't run away, an' if
thieves was to ransack it from attic to cellar they'd find nothin'
worth carryin' away. Ridiculous!"
"She says she hasn't anything to wear," interrupted Bob.
"Delight Hathaway! For shame!" said the elder woman, raising a
reproving finger. "You always look pretty as a picture in anything.
Some folks need fine clothes to set 'em off but you don't. Don't be
silly! Why, half the pleasure of Willie an' me would be wiped out if
you didn't go, an' likely Bob would be disappointed, too."
"You bet I would!"
"W--e--ll," the girl yielded.
"There, that's right, my dear." Celestina reached out and patted the
slender hand. "Now, Bob, you go along an' write your letter,"
commanded she. "An' Delight, you bring me up some hot water an' fetch
my clean print dress from the hall closet. I kinder think, come to
mull it over, that there's fresh cuffs on my cashmere already, but you
might look an' see. An' hadn't we better furbish up my bonnet this
afternoon? It ain't been touched this season."
CHAPTER XV
A REVELATION
The morning of the pilgrimage to Belleport was a hectic one in the gray
cottage on the bluff. Before breakfast C
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