I enquired: “Do you think they have a chance on earth?” They turned to face me fully. “But we thought you were against us in the matter!” My calm was now uncivil. “With every acquaintance taking a hand, they are, of course, heading for the rocks.” “Dear me! Dear me!” grieved Mr. Tillinghast. “I should really dislike to think it. They’re so well matched in the way of looks. I admire Eva’s looks more than I can tell you.” He failed to observe that Miss Augusta now strung his well meant words on a handy rosary to be used during his inevitable penance. He swept into what was almost lyricism. “She has such a broad and gracious brow, and her eyebrows take a flying line. Her hair seems to fly upwards, too, although it really never blows about. Did you ever notice that about her, Augusta--that she is never frowsy? There’s something about her,” he said in his nice elderly voice, “that is wing-like, aspiring. She’s--she’s aloof, untouchable, and reaching up. She seems to be looking at a facet of the star to which she’s hitched her wagon; and the star is eternally within and beyond her reach, poor girl!” “Well!” The monosyllable might have been propelled from Miss Augusta by her inner and boiling emotions. Mr. Tillinghast gave her every indication of having jumped the fence. Gazing into space made lovely by his faint regret, he said: “Her mouth--such a small mouth!--is fastidious.” Miss Augusta said: “But not generous.” Mr. Tillinghast asked her: “Have you ever noticed that she has the nicest little straight nose?” “It will be pinched when she is older,” remarked Miss Augusta. I hurried to the window embrasure and stood looking down into the uninteresting street; I hoped they would take my shaking form for the sign of some tender emotion. That they did was proven by their guilty haste in urging me back to the tea table. “Poor Tilly isn’t what he was,” Miss Augusta reassured me in a whisper, as she plied me with a fresh buttered muffin. “Do eat this, Mrs. Avery. You’re such a scrap of a person, I always think you must be dieting.” “If you mean, that he’s in love with her,” I suggested maliciously, “he is eating too many muffins for that state of mind.” For Mr. Tappan Tillinghast had absent-mindedly reached out a heavily veined hand and appropriated the muffin intended for me. His eyes retained his visions; he dreamily munched the muffin. Sure of Miss Augusta’s sympathetic understanding because he had always been able to count on it, he thought aloud. “It must have been such a strange contrast, that between Lavinia and Eva, the day they met. Both such pale women.” “Indeed!” sniffed Miss Augusta. “And how, pray, did you come to know about it?” “A little bird told me,” said he with another of this group’s platitudes. He put a roguish head on one side. “Meaning Gertrude? She had little to do, not to tell her own aunt!” “No,” he said. “Oh, no indeed: Lavinia told me.”