Hazel did not let go things; her little witch-wand, once pointed,
held its divining angle with the might of magic until somebody broke
ground.

"It's awful!" Helena declared to her mother and sisters, with tears
of consternation. "And she wants me to go round with her and carry
'compliments!' It'll never be got over,--never! I wish I could go
away to boarding-school!"

For Mrs. Ripwinkley had made up her unsophisticated mind to try this
thing; to put this grain of a pure, potent salt, right into the
seethe and glitter of little Boston, and find out what it would
decompose or precipitate. For was not she a mother, testing the
world's chalice for her children? What did she care for the hiss and
the bubble, if they came?

She was wider awake than Mrs. Ledwith knew; perhaps they who come
down from the mountain heights of long seclusion can measure the
world's paces and changes better than they who have been hurried in
the midst of them, on and on, or round and round.

Worst of all, old Uncle Titus took it up.

It was funny,--or it would have been funny, reader, if anybody but
you and I and Rachel Froke knew exactly how,--to watch Uncle Titus
as he kept his quiet eye on all these things,--the things that he
had set going,--and read their revelations; sheltered, disguised,
under a character that the world had chosen to put upon him, like
Haroun Alraschid in the merchant's cloak.