When Mrs. Swayne left the parlor in the manner which we have already related, she rushed out, partly to be relieved of her wrath, partly to pour her prophecies of evil into the ears of the other Cassandra on the other side of the road, old Betty of the Gates. The old woman was sitting before her fire when her neighbor went in upon her. To be sure it was summer, but Betty’s fire was eternal, and burned without intermission on the sacred hearth. She was mending one of her gowns, and had a whole bundle of bits of colored print--“patches,” for which some of the little girls in Miss Brownlow’s school would have given their ears--spread out upon the table before her. Bits of all Betty’s old gowns were there. It was a parti-colored historical record of her life, from the gay calicoes of her youth down to the sober browns and olives of declining years. With such a gay centre the little room looked very bright. There was a geranium in the window, ruby and emerald. There were all manner of pretty confused cross-lights from the open door and the latticed window in the other corner and the bright fire; and the little old face in its white cap was as brown and as red as a winter apple. Mrs. Swayne was a different sort of person. She came in, filling the room with shadows, and put herself away in a big elbow-chair, with blue and white cushions, which was Betty’s winter throne, but now stood pushed into a corner out of reach of the fire. She uttered a sigh which blew away some of the patches on the table, and swayed the ruby blossoms of the big geranium. “Well,” she said, “I’ve done my best--I can say I’ve done my best. If the worst comes to the worst, there’s none as can blame me.” “What is it?--what is it, Mrs. Swayne?” said Betty, eagerly, dropping her work, “though I’ve something as tells me it’s about that poor child and our Mr. John.” “I wash my hands of them,” said the visitor, doing so in a moist and demonstrative way. “I’ve done all as an honest woman can do. Speak o’ mothers!--mothers is a pack o’ fools. I’d think o’ that child’s interest if it was me. I’d think what was best for her character, and for keeping her out o’ mischief. As for cryin’, and that sort, they all cry--it don’t do them no harm. If you or me had set our hearts on marryin’ the first gentleman as ever was civil, what would ha’ become of us? Oh the fools as some folks is! It’s enough to send a woman with a bit of sense out o’ her mind.” “Marryin’?” said Betty, with a little shriek; “you don’t mean to say as they’ve gone as far as that.”