said this evening, with her
sympathetic smile.

"Oh, Aunt Alice--if you could go! Didn't you love it?"

"Love the opera? Do you hear her, Chris? But I didn't love people
talking all about me--and they will do it, you know! And that makes one
furious!"

"I see you getting furious," Norma observed, incredulously.

"You don't know me! But I was a bashful, adoring sort of little person,
on my first night----"

"Yes, you were," Chris teased her, over a lazy ripple of thirds. "She
was such a bashful little person at the Mardi Gras dance she promised
Artie Peyton her first cotillion the following season."

"Oh, Aunt Alice--you didn't!"

Alice's rather colourless face flushed happily, and she half lowered her
lids.

"Chris thinks that is a great story on me. As a matter of fact, I did do
that; I was just childish enough. But I can't think how the story got
out, for I was desperately ashamed of it."

"I told Aunt Annie and Leslie to-day that you wanted the Liggetts to
dine here that night," Norma said, suddenly. Instantly she realized that
she had made a mistake. And there was no one in the world whose light
reproof hurt her as Alice's did.

"You--you gave my invitation to Leslie?" Alice asked, quietly.

"Well--not quite that. But I told her that you had said that you meant
to ask them," Norma replied, uncomfortably.

"But, Norma, I did not ask you to mention it." Alice was even smiling,
but she seemed a little puzzled.

"I'm so sorry--if you didn't want me to!"

"It isn't that. But one feels that one----"

"What is Norma sorry about?" Chris asked, coming back to the fire.
"Norma, you're up against a terrible tribunal, here! Alice has been
known--well, even to give new hats to the people who make her angry!"

This fortunate allusion to an event now some months old entirely
restored Alice's good humour. Norma had accepted a certain almost-new
hat from Leslie just before the wedding, and Alice, burning with her
secret suspicion as to Norma's parentage, and in the first flush of her
affection for the girl, had told Norma that in her opinion Leslie should
not have offered it. It was not for Norma to take any patronage from her
cousin, Alice said to herself. But Norma's distress at having
disappointed Alice was so fresh and honest that the episode had ended
with Alice's presenting her with a stunning new hat, to wipe out the
terrible effect of her mild criticism.

"You're a virago," said Chris, seating himself