red in a confidential undertone, the purport
of which is none of our business, young Mr. Winslow took his departure
from the Dabney homestead. Simultaneously the vigilant warder abandoned
her post in the front hall and returned to her special domain at the
back of the house. Left alone, the girl sat on the porch with her
troubled face cupped in her hands and a furrow of perplexity spoiling
her smooth white brow. Presently the gate latch clicked and her sister,
a year and a half her junior, came up the walk. With half an eye anyone
would have known them for sisters. They looked alike, which is another
way of saying both of them were pretty and slim and quick in their
movements.

"Hello, sis," said Mildred by way of greeting. She dropped into a chair,
smoothing down the front of her white middy blouse and fanning her
flushed face with the broad ends of her sailor tie. Then observing her
sister's despondent attitude: "What are you in the dumps about? Has that
new beau of yours turned out a disappointment? Or what?"

In a passionate little burst Emmy Lou's simmering indignation boiled up
and overflowed.

"Oh, it's Aunt Sharley again! Honestly, Mil, she was absolutely
unbearable this evening. It was bad enough to have her go stalking
across the lawn with that old snuff stick of hers stuck in the corner of
her mouth, and singing that terrible song of hers at the very top of her
lungs and wearing that scandalous old straw hat stuck up on her
topknot--that was bad enough, goodness knows! I don't know what sort of
people Har--Mr. Winslow thinks we must be! But that was only the
beginning."

Followed a recapitulation of the greater grievance against the absent
offender. Before Emmy Lou was done baring the burden of her complaint
Mildred's lips had tightened in angered sympathy.

"It must have been just perfectly awfully horrible, Em," she said with a
characteristic prodigality of adjectives when the other had finished her
recital. "You just ought to give Aunt Sharley a piece of your mind about
the way she behaves. And the worst of it is she gets worse all the time.
Don't you think you're the only one she picks on. Why, don't you
remember, Em, how just here only the other day she jumped on me because
I went on the moonlight excursion aboard the _Sophie K. Foster_ with
Sidney Baumann?--told me right to my face I ought to be spanked and put
to bed for daring to run round with 'codfish aristocracy'--the very
words she used. Wha