“But, grandaunt, I feel that I ought to tell you.”

“Tell me nothing. Don’t you know how to be silent? Set about learning, then. When I have neuralgia in my eyebrow, you are to speak only from necessity; when I have it in the eye itself, you are not to speak at all. Find me a caraway, and don’t bungle.”

She handed her velvet bag to Anne, and refitted the fingers of her yellow glove: evidently the young girl’s duties were beginning.

Several days passed, but the neuralgia always prevented the story. At last the eyebrow was released, and then Anne spoke. “I wish to tell you, grandaunt, before I come to you, that I am engaged—engaged to be married.”

“Who cares?” said Miss Vanhorn. “To the man in the moon, I suppose; most school- girls are.”

“No, to—”

“Draw up my shawl,” interrupted the old woman. “I do not care who it is. Why do you keep on telling me?”

“Because I did not wish to deceive you.”

“Wait till I ask you not to deceive me. Who is the boy?”

“His name is Erastus Pronando,” began Anne; “and—”

“Pronando?” cried Katharine Vanhorn, in a loud, bewildered voice—”Pronando?  And his father’s name?”

“John, I believe,” said Anne, startled by the change in the old face. “But he has been dead many years.”

Old Katharine rose; her hands trembled, her eyes flashed. “You will give up this boy at once and forever,” she said, violently, “or my compact with you is at an end.”

“How can I, grandaunt? I have promised—”

“I believe I am mistress of my own actions; and in this affair I will have no sort of hesitation,” continued the old woman, taking the words from Anne, and tapping a chair back angrily with her hand.  “Decide now—this moment.  Break this engagement, and my agreement remains. Refuse to break it, and it falls. That is all.”

“You are unjust and cruel,” said the girl, roused by these arbitrary words. Miss Vanhorn waved her hand for silence.

“If you will let me tell you, aunt—”

The old woman bounded forward suddenly, as if on springs, seized her niece by both shoulders, and shook her with all her strength. “There!” she said, breathless. “Will you stop talking! All I want is your answer—yes, or no.”

The drawing room of Madame Moreau had certainly never witnessed such a sight as this. One of its young ladies shaken—yes, absolutely shaken like a refractory child! The very chairs and tables seemed to tremble, and visibly hope that there was no one in the salon des élèves, behind.

Anne was more startled than hurt by her grandaunt’s violence. “I am sorry to displease you,” she said, slowly and very gravely; “but I can not break my engagement.”

Without a word, Miss Vanhorn drew her shawl round her shoulders, pinned it, crossed the room, opened the door, and was gone. A moment later her carriage rolled away, and Anne, alone in the drawing room, listened to the sound of the wheels growing fainter and fainter, with a chilly mixture of blank surprise, disappointment, and grief filling her heart. “But it was right that I should tell her,” she said to herself as she went up stairs —”It was right.”

Right and wrong always presented herself to her as black and white. She knew no shading. She was wrong; there are grays. But, so far in her life, she had not been taught by sad experience to see them. “It was right,” she repeated to Helen, a little miserably, but still steadfastly.

“I am not so sure of that,” replied Mrs. Lorrington.  “You have lost a year’s fixed income for those children, and a second winter here for yourself; and for what? For the sake of telling the dragon something which does not concern her, and which she did not wish to know.”

“But it was true.”

“Are we to go out with trumpets and tell everything we know, just because it is true? Is there not such a thing as egotistical truthfulness?”

“It makes no difference,” said Anne, despairingly. “I had to tell her.”

“You are stubborn, Crystal, and you see but one side of a question. But never fear; we will circumvent the dragon yet. I wonder, though, why she was so wrought up by the name Pronando? Perhaps Aunt Gretta will know.”

Miss Teller did not know; but one of the husky-voiced old gentlemen who kept up the “barrier, sir, against modern innovation,” remembered the particulars  (musty and dusty now) of Kate Vanhorn’s engagement to one of the Pronandos—the wild one who ran away. He was younger than she was, a handsome fellow (yes, yes, he remembered it all now), and “she was terribly cut up about it, and went abroad immediately.” Abroad— great panacea for American woes! To what continent can those who live “abroad” depart when trouble seizes them in its pitiless claws?