"I believe I know: you are engaged to be married." The words were very faint: they would have reached the subtlest ear with the suggestiveness of a light dreary wind blowing over a desolation. "Yes; I am engaged to be married." Amy affirmed it with a definite stress. "It is this that has made you a woman? "It is this that has made me a woman." After the silence of a moment Mrs. Falconer inquired: "You do not expect to ask my consent--my advice?" "I certainly do not expect to ask your consent--your advice." Amy was taking her revenge now--and she always took it as soon as possible. "Nor your uncle's?" "Nor my uncle's." After another, longer silence: "Do you care to tell me how long this engagement has lasted?" "Certainly!--Since last night." "Thank you for telling me that. I think I must go back to my work now." She walked slowly away. Amy sat still, twirling her bonnet strings and smiling to herself. This outburst of her new dignity--this initial assertion of her womanhood--had come almost as unexpectedly to herself as to her aunt. She had scarcely known it was in herself to do such a thing. Certain restrictions had been chafing her for a long time: she had not dreamed that they could so readily be set aside, that she had only to stamp her foot violently down on another foot and the other foot would be jerked out of the way. In the flush of elation, she thought of what had just taken place as her Declaration of Independence. She kept on celebrating it in a sort of intoxication at her own audacity: "I have thrown off the yoke of the Old Dynasty! Glory for the thirteen colonies! A Revolution in half an hour! I'm the mother of a new country! Washington, salute me!" Then, with perhaps somewhat the feeling of a pullet that has whipped a hen in a barnyard and that after an interval will run all the way across the barnyard to attack again and see whether the victory is complete, she rose and went across the garden, bent on trying the virtue of a final peck. "But you haven't congratulated me, Aunt Jessica! You have turned your back on the bride elect--you with all your fine manners! She presents herself once more to your notice the future Mrs. Joseph Holden, Junior, to be married one month from last night!" And unexpectedly standing in front of Mrs. Falconer, Amy made one of her low bows which she had practised in the minuet. But catching the sight of the face of her aunt, she cried remorsefully: "Oh, I have been so rude to you, Aunt Jessica! Forgive me!" There was something of the new sense of womanhood in her voice and of the sisterhood in suffering which womanhood alone can bring. But Mrs. Falconer had not heard Amy's last exclamation. "What do you mean?" she asked with quick tremulous eagerness. She had regained her firmness of demeanour, which alone should have turned back any expression of sympathy before it could have been offered.