"N-no!" said Miss Johanna, slowly and meditatively. "Nothing precisely wrong that I know of. Nothing half as wrong as this knitting!" she added briskly. "Come here, child! You and Sarepta Darwin together having accomplished this atrocity of teaching me to knit, are bound to see me through. I seem to have done something queer here!" Kitty sat down beside her on the leather sofa, and for some minutes both were absorbed in the mysteries of purling, compared with which, Miss Johanna declared, those of Eleusis were kindergarten play. "That's a ridiculous tune!" she remarked presently. "It keeps jigging through my head so, I can't keep my feet still. So you used to dance it with Tommy Lee. Tommy was a nice boy; I always liked him. Do you ever hear from him, Kitty?" "No," said Kitty quietly. "I believe he is doing very well--Mr. Chanter heard of him last winter from a friend who had met him in the West--but I don't know that any one has heard directly." She did not add that, according to Cissy Sharpe, "they claimed" that Tom Lee had married the widow of a cattle king, and was spending millions on a marble palace overlooking the Golden Gate; she did not believe this, but it hurt, somehow. If he would only write a line; a postal card even! Cissy had heard it in Tinkham; she fixed greedy eyes on Kitty as she spoke. Millions of money, they claimed! A handsome woman, ten years older than what he was. She presumed Kitty knew more about it than what she did; ha! ha! "There!" Kitty handed Miss Johanna her knitting and took up her own. "That's all clear, dear. Now knit straight on, ten rows, and then I'll show you about the neck." A long silence followed, broken only by clicking needles and purring fire. Presently Miss Johanna spoke, abruptly: "Elderly marriages are _ridiculous_! Grandpa Westcott to the contrary notwithstanding. _Ridiculous!_" Kitty started, then looked up wondering. "Are they?" she said vaguely. "And what about Grandpa Westcott, Aunt Johanna?" Miss Johanna looked a little confused. "My dear," she said, "I was just thinking aloud. I was in a referee, as old Mr. Weller says. Nothing of importance; and then I thought of Grandpa Westcott; that's all!" "Did he elderly marry?" Kitty roused herself with a little effort. _If it were true, what did anything else matter?_ But that was no reason why she should be an unsociable curmudgeon. "Tell me about him, Aunt Jo! dear Father never had time to tell me family stories, and blessed Mother didn't know them, I suppose. Let's have a good tell now!" She looked up brightly. Miss Johanna returned the smile, not quite with her usual crisp composure. Her fine eyebrows lifted and knitted in a curious little way they had when she was disturbed; her laugh rang not wholly clear.