“Oh, auntie,” she cried, and her little hands clasped each other more tightly as she took a step forward, “don’t speak so to me. I am so desolate, and I had not anywhere else to go. I thought you would be lonely eating dinner alone, and might be glad to see me.” “Glad to see you after all you’ve done! You must think me a saint, which I don’t pretend to be,” was the harsh reply, as Aunt Jerusha hurried past Edna, without noticing the hand involuntarily stretched out toward her. Going into her bedroom to lay her bonnet and cloak aside, Miss Pepper’s lip quivered a little as she said to herself,— “The child has suffered, and no mistake, but I’m not going to be talked over at once. She deserves a good lesson. If she was a youngster, I’d spank her smartly and be done with it, but as I can’t do that I shall carry a stiff upper lip a spell, till she’s fairly cowed.” With this intention Miss Pepper returned to the attack, and once having opened her volley of abuse,—reproof she called it,—she did not know where to stop, and said far more than she really felt or had at first any intention of saying. The runaway match with a mere boy; the meanness, aye the dishonesty of breaking the contract with the principal of the seminary, and leaving that four hundred dollars for some one else to pay; the littleness of wearing jewelry which a stranger must pay for, and the wickedness of decoying a young man into marriage, and thereby causing him to lose his life, and making her a murderess, were each in turn brought up and eloquently handled; while Edna stood with bowed head and heard it quietly, until her aunt reached the _ring_, and asked if she was not ashamed to wear it. Then it was that the “pale-gray look came over her face and the steel-gray look in her eye,” as she took the golden band from her finger, and laid it away in her purse, saying in a voice Miss Pepper would never have recognized as Edna’s,— “You are right, auntie. I am a murderess, and I ought not to wear this ring until I have paid for it myself, and I never will.”