e kitchen door and round the house out the little
gate so Grandma won't see me. I must hurry for I ought to have been back
ten minutes ago."

"But you haven't been to the store," said Marcia in a dismayed whisper.

"Oh, well, that don't matter! I'll tell her they didn't have what she sent
me for. Good-bye. You better hurry." So saying, she disappeared into the
kitchen; and Marcia, startled by such easy morality, stood dazed until the
knocker sounded forth again, this time a little more peremptorily, as the
elder aunt took her turn at it.

And so at last Marcia was face to face with the Misses Spafford.

They came in, each with her knitting in a black silk bag on her slim arm,
and greeted the flushed, perturbed Marcia with gentle, righteous, rigid
inspection. She felt with the first glance that she was being tried in the
fire, and that it was to be no easy ordeal through which she was to pass.
They had come determined to sift her to the depths and know at once the
worst of what their beloved nephew had brought upon himself. If they found
aught wrong with her they meant to be kindly and loving with her, but they
meant to take it out of her. This had been the unspoken understanding
between them as they wended their dignified, determined way to David's
house that afternoon, and this was what Marcia faced as she opened the
door for them.

She gasped a little, as any girl overwhelmed thus might have done. She did
not tilt her chin in defiance as Kate would have done. The thought of
David came to support her, and she grasped for her own little part and
tried to play it creditably. She did not know whether the aunts knew of
her true identity or not, but she was not left long in doubt.

"My dear, we have long desired to know you, of whom we have heard so
much," recited Miss Amelia, with slightly agitated mien, as she bestowed a
cool kiss of duty upon Marcia's warm cheek. It chilled the girl, like the
breath from a funeral flower.

"Yes, it is indeed a pleasure to us to at last look upon our dear nephew's
wife," said Miss Hortense quite precisely, and laid the sister kiss upon
the other cheek. In spite of her there flitted through Marcia's brain the
verse, "Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the
other also." Then she was shocked at her own irreverence and tried to put
away a hysterical desire to laugh.

The aunts, too, were somewhat taken aback. They had not looked for so
girlish a wife. She was no