With this she began to cry a little, merely by way of distraction to fill up the time, for Elly was not at all given to crying. There was a sound in the midst of it as if John were coming downstairs, and then Elly immediately cried, ‘Hush!’ as if Susie had been the guilty person, and dried her eyes. But John did not come downstairs. He was still to be heard stamping and moving about overhead. And presently Elly resumed. ‘He must be making a dreadful mess of his things,’ she said, with a tone of resignation. ‘So does Dick when he packs for himself, but Percy never. Percy is always neat--and yet to think it was he who said that!’ There was again a little pause, both listening to every sound upstairs, Susie, puzzled and disturbed, not knowing what to say, while Elly, altogether absorbed in this new relationship, which was at once authoritative and subject, could neither think nor speak of anything but Jack. There was not much of the confused rapture of a newly-developed love about her. Even at the first moment there had been something of the familiar sway of a sister in Elly’s treatment of John, and now she was anxious, bewildered, not knowing what to make of him, feeling that he had gone out of her ken into a region influenced by a man’s motives, not a woman’s, which are different. Elly gave presently a glance at the clock, and took out her watch and compared it, then gave a sigh of relief. ‘He is too late,’ she said, ‘thank goodness, for this train. He must wait till night now,’ whereupon she became more composed, and her excitement calmed down. But Susie did not know what to say in this curious position of affairs. To take this pretty young stranger into her arms and talk to her of all John’s excellencies, and kiss her and cry over her with pleasure, as is the wont of a young man’s admiring and sympathetic sister with his love, seemed out of place with Elly, whom she scarcely knew, who seemed to know John better than she did, and who, in place of the emotional stage, was in the anxious one, rather regarding John as a wife does who is concerned about how her husband is going to act in a certain position of affairs which affects their well-being, than as a rapturous girl ready to find everything her lover does half divine. There was care instead of ecstacy on Elly’s brow, and that little conflict of opinion which must take place sometimes between all properly endowed minds, even in the closest relationship, was in full force. She resumed after a time the discussion in which Susie could not take an active part. ‘Don’t you think,’ she said, ‘that instead of starting off like this, to make his fortune--as if a fortune could be made in a day!--it would have been more sensible to wait and give them a little time?’ ‘I am sure I don’t know,’ said Susie, diffidently. ‘You are so young. You didn’t mean to---- to marry all at once, even if your papa gave his consent.’