Elizabeth looked up with a worried pucker between her girlish brows. "I don't see how I am going to help it, grandma," she sighed; "I really must have suitable clothes." "I agree with you there, Lizzie," said Mrs. Carroll, eyeing her granddaughter keenly over the top of her spectacles; "but you aren't going to have them, if you let that Sipp girl tell you what to buy." "It isn't _Sipp_, grandma, it's Tripp. T-r-i-p-p," said Elizabeth, in a long-suffering tone; "and she knows better than any one in Innisfield possibly can what I am going to need in Boston." "You'll find the people in Boston won't take any particular interest in your petticoats, Lizzie," her grandmother told her pointedly. But the girl had spied her lover coming up the walk toward the house and had flown to meet him. "What's the matter, sweetheart?" asked the young man, examining his treasure with the keen eyes of love. "You look tired and--er--worried. Anything wrong, little girl?" "N-no," denied Elizabeth evasively. "Only grandma has such queer, old-fashioned ideas about--clothes. And she thinks I ought to have just what she had when she was married to grandfather fifty years ago. Of course I want to have everything nice and--suitable for Boston, you know." "What you are wearing now is pretty enough for anywhere," declared Sam Brewster, with masculine obtuseness. "Don't you bother one minute about clothes, darling; you'd look lovely in anything." Then he kissed her faintly smiling lips with the fatuous idea that the final word as to wedding finery had been said. CHAPTER IV "If you can give me just a minute, Richard, before you go out." It was Mrs. North's timidly apologetic voice which broke in upon her husband's hasty preparations for a day's professional engagements. Dr. North faced about with a laughing twinkle in his eyes. "I know your minutes, Lizzie," he said, absent-mindedly sniffling at the cork of a half-emptied bottle. "This gentian's no good; I've a mind to ship it back to Avery's and tell them what I think of the firm for selling adulterated drugs. It's an outrage on suffering humanity. I'll write to them anyway." And he began to rummage his desk in quest of stationery. "I wanted to speak to you about Bessie's things," persisted Mrs. North. "You know you gave me some money for her wedding clothes last month; but it isn't--it won't be nearly enough." "What on earth have you been buying for the child?" asked her husband. "I should think with what she has already the money I gave you would go quite a ways." "That's just it," sighed Mrs. North. "Bessie thinks none of the things she has are--suitable." She hesitated a little over the hard-worked word. "Of course living in Boston, and----"