her an interminable walk, though in reality it was
but four village blocks, they arrived at the house of Spafford.

CHAPTER XII

"This is your Aunt Clarinda!"

There was challenge in the severely spoken pronoun Aunt Hortense used. It
seemed to Marcia that she wished to remind her that all her old life and
relations were passed away, and she had nothing now but David's,
especially David's relatives. She shrank from lifting her eyes, expecting
to find the third aunt, who was older, as much sourer and sharper in
proportion to the other two, but she controlled herself and lifted her
flower face to meet a gentle, meek, old face set in soft white frills of a
cap, with white ribbons flying, and though the old lady leaned upon a
crutch she managed to give the impression that she had fairly flown in her
gladness to welcome her new niece. There was the lighting of a repressed
nature let free in her kind old face as she looked with true pleasure upon
the lovely young one, and Marcia felt herself folded in truly loving arms
in an embrace which her own passionate, much repressed, loving nature
returned with heartiness. At last she had found a friend!

She felt it every time she spoke, more and more. They walked out into the
garden almost immediately, and Aunt Clarinda insisted upon hobbling along
by Marcia's side, though her sisters both protested that it would be too
hard for her that warm afternoon. Every time that Marcia spoke she felt
the kind old eyes upon her, and she knew that at least one of the aunts
was satisfied with her as a wife for David, for her eyes would travel from
David to Marcia and back again to David, and when they met Marcia's there
was not a shade of disparagement in them.

It was rather a tiresome walk through a tiresome old garden, laid out in
the ways of the past generation, and bordered with much funereal box. The
sisters, Amelia and Hortense, took the new member of the family,
conscientiously, through every path, and faithfully told how each spot was
associated with some happening in the family history. Occasionally there
was a solemn pause for the purpose of properly impressing the new member
of the house, and Amelia wiped her eyes with her carefully folded
handkerchief. Marcia felt extremely like laughing. She was sure that if
Kate had been obliged to pass through this ordeal she would have giggled
out at once and said some shockingly funny thing that would h