owl!" she said.

Then came old Mrs. Kirby in her black silk visite, her parasol held high
above her head, and with mathematical precision directly over it, though
the afternoon sun, slanting from the west, shone steadily into her eyes
underneath, so that she was kept winking and blinking all the way. She
came to offer their residence; the full half of it stood empty, and,
needless to say that she and Reginald would be "right glad" if the
ladies would accept it. But Mrs. Rutherford confided, to Margaret this
time, that nothing would induce her to go there. "She would be sure to
come in every day with cookies hidden somewhere about her, and then
_nibble_."

"They're wafers, I think," said Margaret, laughing.

"Wafers or cookies, she crunches when she eats them; I've heard her,"
Mrs. Rutherford declared. "It's all very well for you to laugh,
Margaret; _you_ have no sensitiveness. I wish I had a cooky now," she
went on, irrelevantly--"a real one; or else a jumble, or a cruller, or
an oley-koek. But there's no getting anything in this desolate place;
their one idea is plum-cake--plum-cake!"

Mrs. Kirby was followed by Mr. Moore, who brought a note from his wife,
cordially placing at the disposal of the northern party "five pleasant
rooms at the rectory," which could be made ready for them at any time
upon shortest notice.

"They haven't more than six in all," commented Winthrop. "Does this
mean, do you suppose, that they intend to shut themselves up into one,
and give up to us all the rest?"

"Very probably," Margaret answered.

But the Moores were not obliged to make good their generous offer. Mrs.
Rutherford said that she could not possibly live in the house with an
invalid. "Always little messes being carried clinking up-stairs on
waiters, or left standing outside of doors for people to tumble
over;--cups, with dregs of tea in them, set into each other. Horrid!"

"But there are no stairs at the rectory," suggested Winthrop.

"Don't be owlish, Evert; one is even more apt to step into them on a
ground-floor," replied the aunt.

Meanwhile the sea still washed the beach under the eyrie, and now, too,
the nerves of almost everybody in it, for neither Margaret nor Celestine
could sleep when Mrs. Rutherford could not; even Winthrop, at the
Seminole, found himself wakeful, listening to the little soft sound,
and thinking of his suffering aunt. For in spite of her fancies and her
fairly good appetite, in spite of her r