pink. "He's kissed her under that tree at the corner, away from
the lamp-post," Ann Eliza said to herself, with sudden insight into
unconjectured things. On Sundays they usually went for the whole
afternoon to the Central Park, and Ann Eliza, from her seat in the
mortal hush of the back room, followed step by step their long slow
beatific walk.

There had been, as yet, no allusion to their marriage, except that
Evelina had once told her sister that Mr. Ramy wished them to invite
Mrs. Hochmuller and Linda to the wedding. The mention of the laundress
raised a half-forgotten fear in Ann Eliza, and she said in a tone of
tentative appeal: "I guess if I was you I wouldn't want to be very great
friends with Mrs. Hochmuller."

Evelina glanced at her compassionately. "I guess if you was me you'd
want to do everything you could to please the man you loved. It's
lucky," she added with glacial irony, "that I'm not too grand for
Herman's friends."

"Oh," Ann Eliza protested, "that ain't what I mean--and you know it
ain't. Only somehow the day we saw her I didn't think she seemed like
the kinder person you'd want for a friend."

"I guess a married woman's the best judge of such matters," Evelina
replied, as though she already walked in the light of her future state.

Ann Eliza, after that, kept her own counsel. She saw that Evelina wanted
her sympathy as little as her admonitions, and that already she counted
for nothing in her sister's scheme of life. To Ann Eliza's idolatrous
acceptance of the cruelties of fate this exclusion seemed both natural
and just; but it caused her the most lively pain. She could not divest
her love for Evelina of its passionate motherliness; no breath of reason
could lower it to the cool temperature of sisterly affection.

She was then passing, as she thought, through the novitiate of her pain;
preparing, in a hundred experimental ways, for the solitude awaiting her
when Evelina left. It was true that it would be a tempered loneliness.
They would not be far apart. Evelina would "run in" daily from the
clock-maker's; they would doubtless take supper with her on Sundays. But
already Ann Eliza guessed with what growing perfunctoriness her sister
would fulfill these obligations; she even foresaw the day when, to get
news of Evelina, she should have to lock the shop at nightfall and go
herself to Mr. Ramy's door. But on that contingency she would not dwell.
"They can come to me when they want to--they'll