Chapter 5 - Page 2

their mother's was taken
from its linen cerements, and thus adorned Evelina
blushingly departed with Mr. Ramy, while the elder sister sat down
in her place at the pinking-machine.

It seemed to Ann Eliza that she was alone for hours, and she
was surprised, when she heard Evelina tap on the door, to find that
the clock marked only half-past ten.

"It must have gone wrong again," she reflected as she rose to
let her sister in.

The evening had been brilliantly interesting, and several
striking stereopticon views of Berlin had afforded Mr. Ramy the
opportunity of enlarging on the marvels of his native city.

"He said he'd love to show it all to me!" Evelina declared as
Ann Eliza conned her glowing face. "Did you ever hear anything so
silly? I didn't know which way to look."

Ann Eliza received this confidence with a sympathetic murmur.

"My bonnet IS becoming, isn't it?" Evelina went on
irrelevantly, smiling at her reflection in the cracked glass above
the chest of drawers.

"You're jest lovely," said Ann Eliza.

Spring was making itself unmistakably known to the distrustful
New Yorker by an increased harshness of wind and prevalence of
dust, when one day Evelina entered the back room at supper-time
with a cluster of jonquils in her hand.

"I was just that foolish," she answered Ann Eliza's wondering
glance, "I couldn't help buyin' 'em. I felt as if I must have
something pretty to look at right away."

"Oh, sister," said Ann Eliza, in trembling sympathy. She felt
that special indulgence must be conceded to those in Evelina's
state since she had had her own fleeting vision of such mysterious
longings as the words betrayed.

Evelina, meanwhile, had taken the bundle of dried grasses out
of the broken china vase, and was putting the jonquils in their
place with touches that lingered down their smooth stems and blade-
like leaves.

"Ain't they pretty?" she kept repeating as she gathered the
flowers into a starry circle. "Seems as if spring was really here,
don't it?"

Ann Eliza remembered that it was Mr. Ramy's evening.

When he came, the Teutonic eye for anything that blooms made
him turn at once to the jonquils.

"Ain't dey pretty?" he said. "Seems like as if de spring was
really here."

"Don't it?" Evelina exclaimed, thrilled by the coincidence of
their thought. "It's just what I was saying to my sister."

Ann Eliza got up suddenly and moved away; she remembered that
she had not wound the clock the day before. Evelina was sitting at
the table; the jonquils rose slenderly between herself and Mr.
Ramy.

"Oh," she murmured with vague eyes, "how I'd love to get away
somewheres into the