"The Cleveland man is handsome," said Aunt Nettie irrelevantly--the
Cleveland man was the bridegroom-elect.

"Yes, in a stylish, sporty kind of way. But I don't know--" She
hesitated a moment, then concluded: "Missy doesn't like him."

At that Aunt Nettie laughed with genuine mirth. "What on earth do you
think a child would know about it?" she ridiculed.

Meanwhile the child, whose departure had thus loosed free speech, was
leagues distant from the gossip and the unrest which was its source. Her
pink hair bows, even the second-best ones, lifted her to a state
which made it much pleasanter to idle in her window, sniffing at the
honey-suckle, than to hurry down to the piano. She longed to make up
something which, like a tune of water rippling over pink pebbles, was
running through her head. But faithfully, at last, she toiled through
her hour, and then was called on to mind the Baby.

This last duty was a real pleasure. For she could wheel the perambulator
off to the summerhouse, in a secluded, sweet-smelling corner of the
yard, and there recite poetry aloud. To reinforce those verses she knew
by heart, she carried along the big Anthology which, in its old-blue
binding, contrasted so satisfyingly with the mahogany table in the
sitting-room. The first thing she read was "Before the Beginning of
Years" from "Atalanta in Calydon;" Missy especially adored Swinburne--so
liltingly incomprehensible.

The performance, as ever, was highly successful all around. Baby really
enjoyed it and Poppylinda as well, both of them blinking in placid
appreciation. And as for Missy, the liquid sound of the metres rolling
off her own lips, the phrases so beautiful and so "deep," seemed to lift
a choking something right up into her throat until she could have wept
with the sweet pain of it. She did, as a matter of fact, happy tears,
about which her two auditors asked no embarrassing question. Baby merely
gurgled, and Poppylinda essayed to climb the declaimer's skirts.

"Sit down, sad Soul!" Missy's mood could no longer even attempt to mate
with prose. She turned through the pages of the Anthology until she came
to another favourite:

So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war, There never was knight
like young Lochinvar.

This she read through, with a fine, swinging rhythm. "I think that last
stanza's perfectly exquisite--don't you?" Missy enquired of her mute
audience. And she repeated it, as unctuously as though she were the poet
h