were thirteen groups of cards, arranged with geometrical exactness at
intervals of half an inch.

"Well, Lois," she said, as her niece entered. "Oh, you have brought the
spoons back?" But she interrupted herself, her eyebrows knitted and her
lower lip thrust out, to lift a card slowly, and decide if she should
move it. Then she glanced at the girl over her glasses. "I'm just waiting
here because I must go into the kitchen soon, and look at my cake. That
Betty of mine must needs go and see her sick mother to-day, and I have to
look after things. But I cannot be idle. I declare, there is something
malicious in the way in which the relatives of servants fall ill!"

She stopped here long enough to count the spoons, and then began her game
again. She was able, however, to talk while she played, and pointed out
various things which did not "go quite right" at the wedding.

The parlor at Dale house was as exact and dreary as the garden. The whole
room suggested to Lois, watching her aunt play solitaire, and the motes
dancing in the narrow streaks of sunshine which fell between the bowed
shutters, and across the drab carpet to the white wainscoting on the
other side, the pictures in the Harry and Lucy books, or the parlor
where, on its high mantel shelf, Rosamond kept her purple jar.

She wondered vaguely, as Mrs. Dale moved her cards carefully about,
whether her aunt had ever been "bothered" about anything. Helen's
marriage seemed only an incident to Mrs. Dale; the wedding and the
weather, the dresses and the presents, which had been a breathless
interest to Lois, were apparently of no more importance to the older
woman than the building up a suit.