known.
"I told Mr. Ostermaier that it gave me quite a thrill the way he looked at her as Harold pronounced them man and wife. "All the world loves a lover,' and Cousin Maggie has been reading Ella Wheeler Wilcox diligently all morning.
She turned to go and we breathed easier. Now that we knew they were safely married— Mrs. Ostermaier turned and started back.
"I nearly forgot what brought me," she called. "My Willie found this in the bed of your automobile, Miss Tish." She held out the cigarette case and Tish took it and dropped it into her work-basket.
"It belongs to my nephew, Charlie Sands," she said, looking Mrs. Ostermaier in the eye. Tish has plenty of courage, but I felt calamity coming.
"So I told Mr. Ostermaier,'' the creature said, with a smile. "But he insists on remarking the coincidence that the initials on the cigarette case are W. L. and that the young man's name on the license was Walter Lewis."
I have always thanked Heaven that at that moment her Willie fell off the dock, and although the child was not drowned, still, as Tish wrote to Maria Lee, her niece, "he had swallowed enough water to wash the initials off the tablets of his mother's memory." And so far as we know, although the papers came out with great headlines about the marriage, and another article about the post-office having been robbed—we had nothing whatever to do with that—and about three men disguised as women making their escape toward Canada in a red automobile and having run over a pig at Dorchester Junction—I told Tish at the time it was a pig, but she insisted it was a cow—although the papers came out with all this, nobody ever suspected the truth except Carpenter. He happened to find a menu from the Sherman House at Noblestown floating in the body of the car, and the good-for-nothing took a trip to the city and traced us.
He did not say anything, but about a week later he came to the cottage and put a package on the table in the kitchen.
"It's been puzzlin' me for four days. Miss Lizzie," he said, fumbling with the string of the bundle. "I sez to Mrs. C, sez I, 'It ain't possible,' I sez. 'She sez she lost her shoe when the automobile went into the water, and she's a truthful woman; and yet, two days after, the chambermaid at the Sherman House finds it high and dry under a bureau, forty miles away. It's spooky,' I sez."
Aggie was pouring hot water into the teapot, and she kept on pouring till it went all over the place.
"Nonsense," said Tish. "That shoe doesn't belong to Miss Lizzie,"
But I looked at Carpenter's face and I knew it was hopeless.
"You've been a good friend to us, Mr. Carpenter," I said "We've always felt we'-ve owed you something. Here's a little present, and thank you for the shoe."
He took the money and we looked each other straight in the eye. Then he grinned.
"For twenty dollars, Miss Lizzie," he said, "I'd be willing to swallow my tongue backward. And the shoe ain't the tongue kind."
Chapter II.
A Blue Runabout and a Bad Bridge
Both Aggie and I had objected when Tish talked of buying an automobile. But the more you talk against a thing to Tish the more she wants it. It was just the same the time her niece, Maria Lee, went to Europe for the whole summer and offered Tish her motor-boat. Aggie and I protested, but the boat came, and Tish had a lesson or two and sent to town for a yachting cap. Then, one day when we were making elderberry jelly and ran out of sugar, Tish offered to take me to the mainland in the boat. That was the time, you remember, when the stopping lever got jammed, and Tish and I circled around Lake Penzance for seven hours, with people on different docks trying to lasso us with ropes as we flew past, and Aggie in hysterics on the beach below the cottage.
People of Penzance still speak of that day, for we figured out that we had enough gasoline to run one hundred and sixty miles, and after Peter Miller, at Point Lena, had lassoed us and was dragged for a quarter of a mile before he caught hold of a buoy and could let go of the rope, we got desperate. I was at the wheel and Tish was trying to stop the engine, pouring water over it and attempting to stick an iron rod in the wheels. And just as she succeeded, and the rod shot through the awning on the top of the launch like a sky-rocket, I turned the thing toward shore where it looked fairly flat.
"I'm going to get to land," I said with my teeth clenched. "I don't care if it crawls up and dies in a plowed field; I'm going to get my feet on dry land again."
I had not expected it to stop so suddenly, but it did, and Tish and I and the granulated sugar landed some distance ahead of the boat and well above high-water mark; in fact, Tish broke her collar-bone, and that entire summer, whenever the doctor had to peel off the adhesive plaster, Tish would get ugly and turn on me.
Well, we should have known about the automobile. I had a queer feeling when I started out that morning. Tish had had the car out the day before by herself for the first time— both Aggie and I had had the good judgment to refuse—and she got home safely, although she had a queer-looking mark on her right cheek, and one of the mud-guards didn't look exactly right. She said she had had a lovely ride, and we helped her push the machine into the wash-house, where we had had Carpenter knock out a side, and then she went to bed and had a cup of tea. Aggie heard something moving that night, and she found Tish sitting up on the side of her bed, holding like death to the back of a chair and turning it around like a wheel. Aggie got her back to bed, but Tish only looked up at her and said, "Four chickens!" and went to sleep again.
The next morning her left leg was quite stiff from what she called the clutch, and she sat on the porch peacefully and rocked. But at noon she went to the wash-house, and when she came back she was pale but determined.
"I'm going to take it out," she said solemnly. "If I don't I'll forget everything I've learned. Besides, we've been coming here every summer for ten years, and there are plenty of places we have never seen."
Aggie looked at me, but we knew it would have to come some time, and so we all went in and tied up our heads.
"We needn't go fast," Aggie said when she was putting on her bonnet. "We have all afternoon, and one doesn't really enjoy the scenery unless one goes very slowly."
Tish's face was pallid but resolved.
"It's a great deal easier to go fast than slow," she remarked. "I haven't quite got the hang of going slow. But there's one comfort about going fast: you get around much quicker."
At the foot of the stairs she stopped and called up.
"I'm going to take a tablespoonful of blackberry wine," she said. "I feel chilly in the small of my back."
Aggie and I didn't say anything, but we each took a tablespoonful of blackberry wine also.
Tish had written out a list of things to do to start the car, such as "Turn A," "Push forward B," and so on. And she had pasted bits of paper marked A and B on the levers and plugs. So I read:
"Turn A; push up B; crank, and release C."
It started nicely.
"Just one thing," Tish said over her shoulder as we passed the Ostermaier cottage, and they waved to us from the porch: "Don't scream in my ears; don't
