Five Little Peppers Midway | Page 4

for you to understand how very happy we all are here. The house is quite another place, I assure you, from the abode you saw last before you went abroad."
Mrs. Chatterton gave another low, unpleasant laugh, and this time shrugged her shoulders.
"Polly dear," said Mrs. Whitney with a smile, "say good-morning to Mrs. Chatterton, and then run away. I will hear your wonderful plan by and by. I shall be glad to, child," she was guilty of whispering in the small ear.
"Good-morning, Mrs. Chatterton," said Polly slowly, the brown eyes looking steadily into the traveled and somewhat seamed countenance before her.
"Good-morning," and Polly found herself once more across the floor, and safely out in the hall, the door closed between them.
"Who is she?" she cried in an indignant spasm to Jasper, who ran up, and she lifted her eyes brimming over with something quite new to him. He stopped aghast.
"Who?" he cried. "Oh, Polly! what has happened?"
"Mrs. Chatterton. And she looked at me--oh! I can't tell you how she looked; as if I were a bug, or a hateful worm beneath her," cried Polly, quite as much aghast at herself. "It makes me feel horridly, Jasper--you can't think." Oh! that old"--He stopped, pulling himself up with quite an effort. "Has she come back--what brought her, pray tell, so soon?"
"I don't know, I am sure," said Polly, laughing at his face. "I was only in the room a moment, I think, but it seemed an age with that eyeglass, and that hateful little laugh."
"Oh! she always sticks up that thing in her eye," said Jasper coolly, "and she's everlastingly ventilating that laugh on everybody. She thinks it high-bred and elegant, but it makes people want to kill her for it." He looked and spoke annoyed. "To think you fell into her clutches!" he added.
"Well, who is she?" cried Polly, smoothing down her ruffled feathers, when she saw the effect of her news on him. "I should dearly love to know."
"Cousin Algernon's wife," said Jasper briefly.
"And who is he?" cried Polly, again experiencing a shock that this dreadful person was a relative to whom due respect must be shown.
"Oh! a cousin of father's," said Jasper. "He was nice, but he's dead."
"Oh!" said Polly.
"She's been abroad for a good half-dozen years, and why she doesn't stay there when everybody supposed she was going to, astonishes me," said Jasper, after a moment. "Well, it will not be for long, I presume, that we shall have the honor; she'll be easily tired of America, and take herself off again."
"She doesn't stay in this house, does she, Jasper?" cried Polly in a tone of horror.
"No; that is, unless she chooses to, then we can't turn her off. She's a relative, you know."
"Hasn't she any home?" asked Polly, "or any children?"
"Home? Yes, an estate down in Bedford County?-Dunraven Lodge; but it's all shut up, and in the hands of agents who have been trying for the half-dozen years she was abroad, to sell it for her. She may have come back to settle down there again, there's no telling what she will do. In the meantime, I fancy she'll make her headquarters here," he said gloomily.
"Oh, Jasper!" exclaimed Polly, seizing his arm, feeling that here was need of comfort indeed, "how very dreadful! Don't you suppose something will happen to take her away?"
"I don't see what can," said Jasper, prolonging the gloom to feel the comfort it brought. "You see she has nobody who wants her, to step in and relieve us. She has two nephews, but oh! you ought to see them fight!"
"Fight?" repeated Polly aghast.
"Yes; you can't dignify their skirmishes by any other name," said Jasper, in disgust. "So you see our chances for keeping her as long as she condescends to stay are really very good."
Polly clung to his arm in speechless dismay. Meanwhile conversation fast and brisk was going on between the two shut up in the library.
"It is greatly to your discredit, Marian," said Mrs. Chatterton in a high, cold voice, "that you didn't stop all this nonsense on your father's part, before the thing got to such a pass as to install them in this house."
"On the contrary," said Mrs. Whitney with a little laugh, "I did everything I could to further the plan that father wisely made."
"Wisely!" cried Mrs. Chatterton in scorn. "Oh, you silly child! don't you see what it will all tend to?"
"I see that it has made us all very happy for five years," said Mrs. Whitney, preserving her composure, "so I presume the future doesn't hold much to dread on that score."
"The future is all you have to dread," declared Mrs. Chatterton harshly. "The present may be well enough; though I should think existence with that low, underbred family here, would be a"?
"You may pause just