me and invite you to
dinner for, if she'd acted the way you say?"

In this view it did seem improbable, and Mrs. Lapham was shaken. She
could only say, "Penelope felt just the way I did about it."

Lapham looked at the girl, who said, "Oh, I can't prove it! I begin to
think it never happened. I guess it didn't."

"Humph!" said her father, and he sat frowning thoughtfully a
while--ignoring her mocking irony, or choosing to take her seriously.
"You can't really put your finger on anything," he said to his wife,
"and it ain't likely there is anything. Anyway, she's done the proper
thing by you now."

Mrs. Lapham faltered between her lingering resentment and the appeals
of her flattered vanity. She looked from Penelope's impassive face to
the eager eyes of Irene. "Well--just as you say, Silas. I don't know
as she WAS so very bad. I guess may be she was embarrassed some----"

"That's what I told you, mamma, from the start," interrupted Irene.
"Didn't I tell you she didn't mean anything by it? It's just the way
she acted at Baie St. Paul, when she got well enough to realise what
you'd done for her!"

Penelope broke into a laugh. "Is that her way of showing her
gratitude? I'm sorry I didn't understand that before."

Irene made no effort to reply. She merely looked from her mother to
her father with a grieved face for their protection, and Lapham said,
"When we've done supper, you answer her, Persis. Say we'll come."

"With one exception," said Penelope.

"What do you mean?" demanded her father, with a mouth full of ham.
"Oh, nothing of importance. Merely that I'm not going."

Lapham gave himself time to swallow his morsel, and his rising wrath
went down with it. "I guess you'll change your mind when the time
comes," he said. "Anyway, Persis, you say we'll all come, and then, if
Penelope don't want to go, you can excuse her after we get there.
That's the best way."

None of them, apparently, saw any reason why the affair should not be
left in this way, or had a sense of the awful and binding nature of a
dinner engagement. If she believed that Penelope would not finally
change her mind and go, no doubt Mrs. Lapham thought that Mrs. Corey
would easily excuse her absence. She did not find it so simple a
matter to accept the invitation. Mrs. Corey had said "Dear Mrs.
Lapham," but Mrs. Lapham had her doubts whether it would not be a
servile imitation to say "Dear Mrs. Corey" in return; and she was
torme