A passionate anger flew all over Eva at the bold, unwarrantable intrusion of the two women, whose shameless treatment of her in the past should surely have secured her from their fawning. She did not rise from her seat; she did not utter a word; she simply sat and gazed at them in blank astonishment, but her freezing reception did not disconcert them in the least, for the spinster added affably: “That’s right, Eva, set still! We know you was hurt yesterday an’ must keep quiet. I hope you air feeling better!” and she grabbed Eva’s cold, inert hand, shaking it vigorously, and would have pecked at her cheek with deceitful lips only that Eva resolutely turned her head away. Patty, following her cousin’s lead, caught and pressed the little hand, but it made no response and dropped heavily from her deceitful grasp, while Eva entirely ignored their presence by directing her stony gaze to another part of the room. Nothing daunted, however, Miss Ruttencutter selected the softest, most luxurious seat in the splendid room, closely imitated in everything by the less forward Patty, in whose mind was struggling the consciousness of having so cruelly ill-treated her cousin that this attempt to reinstate herself in Eva’s good graces was, to say the least of it, simply outrageous. Cousin Tabby now turned her gaze on the astonished Mrs. Hamilton, and observed: “Seeing as Eva is feeling too poorly to interduce us, ma’am, my name is Miss Tabitha Ruttencutter, an’ her’n is Miss Patty Groves. What’s your’n?” “I am Eva’s aunt, Mrs. Hamilton,” coolly replied the lady, with a smile of amusement. “You live here?” “Yes.” “Your husband, too?” “Mr. Hamilton is dead.” “Um-hum, poor thing! So I s’pose your brother gives you a home?” Mrs. Hamilton could be haughty enough when she chose, but she perceived that the spinster was too simple to mean anything sarcastic. So she replied, with perfect good humor: “I am not poor, Miss Ruttencutter, but I stay with my brother because we are both lonely, and it is pleasant to be together. It is convenient also to have me here to chaperone Eva.” “Um-hum! Same as I chappyrone Patty,” returned the spinster, with an approving nod that made all her green feathers dance wildly. Then she added, with another nod toward Eva: “I guess you have your two hands full, Mis’ Hamilton, to chappyrone Eva! She never could abide chappyrones. She thought the girls didn’t need ’em.” Eva declined to defend herself or be drawn into the conversation in any way by preserving a countenance of stony immobility that entirely ignored her presuming and unwelcome callers. “Patty, go an’ set by your cousin an’ talk to her, won’t you, whiles I converse with Eva’s aunt?” commanded the spinster, bridling.