Winona murmured indistinctly.
"She didn't—she didn't stop at anything," added the mother, brightly.
"Oh, Mother!"
"I don't care! The Reverend Mallett himself said that novels should be read for an understanding of life—ever novels with a wholesome sex interest. The very words he said!"
"Mother, Mother!" protested Winona with a quick glance at her father.
She doubted if any sex interest could be wholesome; and surely, with both sexes present, the less said about such things the better. To her relief the perilous topic was abandoned.
"I suppose you both heard the big news today."
Mrs. Penniman spoke ingenuously, but it was downright lying—no less. She supposed they had not heard the big news. She was certain they had not. Winona was attentive. Her mother's business of plain and fancy dressmaking did not a little to make the acoustics of Newbern superior. From her clients she gleaned the freshest chronicles of Newbern's social life, many being such as one might safely repeat; many more, Winona uncomfortably recalled, the sort no good woman would let go any further. She hoped the imminent disclosure would not be of the latter class, yet suddenly she wished to hear it even if it were. She affected to turn with reluctance from her budding acquaintanceship with Matthew Arnold.
"It's the twins," began her mother with a look of pleased horror. "You couldn't guess in all day what they've been up to."
"You may be sure Wilbur was the one to blame," put in Winona, quick to defend the one most responsive to her lessons in faith, morals, etiquette.
"Ought to be soundly trounced," declared the judge. "That's what I always say."
"This is the worst yet," continued Mrs. Penniman.
She liked the suspense she had created. With an unerring gift for oral narrative, she toyed with this. She must first tell how she got it.
"You know that georgette waist Mrs. Ed Seaver is having?"
"Have they done something awful?" Winona demanded. "I perfectly well know it wasn't Merle's fault."
"Well, Mrs. Seaver came in about four o'clock for her final fitting, and what do you think?"
"For mercy's sake!" pleaded Winona.
"And Ed Seaver had been to the barber shop to have his hair cut—he always gets it cut the fifteenth of each month—well, he found out all about it from Don Paley, that they'd had to send for to come to the Whipple New Place to cut it neatly off after the way it had been sawed off rough, and she told me word for word. Well, it's unbelievable, and every one saying something ought to be done about it—you just never would be able to guess!"
Winona snapped shut the volume so rich in promise and leaned forward to face her mother desperately. Mrs. Penniman here coughed in a refined and artificial manner as a final preliminary. The parrot instantly coughed in the same manner, and—seeming to like it—again became Mrs. Penniman in a series of mild, throaty preliminary coughs, as if it would presently begin to tell something almost too good. The real tale had to be suspended again for this.
"Well," resumed Mrs. Penniman, feeling that the last value had been extracted from mere suspense, "anyway, it seems that this morning poor little Patricia Whipple was going by the old graveyard, and the twins jumped out and knocked her down and dragged her in there away from the road and simply tore every stitch of clothes off her back and made her dress up in Wilbur's clothes——"
"There!" gasped the horrified Winona. "Didn't I say it would be Wilbur?"
"And then what did they do but cut off her braid with a knife!"
"Wilbur's knife—Merle hasn't any."
"And the Lord knows what the little fiends would have done next, but Juliana Whipple happened to be passing, and heard the poor child's screams and took her away from them."
"That dreadful, dreadful Wilbur!" cried Winona.
"Reform school," spoke the judge, as if he uttered it from the bench.
"But something queer," went on Mrs. Penniman. "Juliana took the twins home in the pony cart, with Wilbur wearing Patricia's dress—it's a plaid gingham I made myself—and someone gave him a lot of money and let him go, and they didn't give Merle any because Ed Seaver saw them on River Street, and Wilbur had it all. And what did Patricia Whipple say to Don Paley but that she was going to have one of the twins for her brother, because no one else would get her a brother, and so she must. But what would she want one of those little cutthroats for? That's what puzzles me."
"Merle is not a cutthroat," said Winona with tightening lips. "He never will be a cutthroat." She left all manner of permissible suspicions about his brother.
"Well, it just beat me!" confessed her mother. "Maybe they've been reading Wild West stories."
"Wilbur, perhaps," insisted Winona. "Merle is already very choice in his reading."
"A puzzle, anyway—why, there they come!"
And the manner of their coming brought more bewilderment to the house of Penniman. For the criminal Wilbur did not come shamed and slinking, but with rather an uplift. Behind him gloomily trod the Merle twin. Even at a distance he was disapproving, accusatory, put upon. It was to be seen that he washed his hands of the evil.
"Whatever in the world—" began Mrs. Penniman, for Wilbur in the hollow of his arm bore a forked branch upon which seemed to perch in all confidence a free bird of the wilds.
"A stuffed bird!" said the peering Winona, and dispelled this illusion.
The twins entered the gate. Midway up the gravelled walk Wilbur Cowan began a gurgling oration.
"I bet nobody can guess what I brought! Yes, sir—a beautiful present for every one—that will make a new man of poor old Judge Penniman, and this lovely orange—that's for Mrs. Penniman—and I bet Winona can't guess what's wrapped up in this box for her—it's the most beautiful album, and this first-class animal for my father, and it'll last a lifetime if he takes care of it good; and I got me a dog to watch the house." Breathless he paused.
"Spent all his money!" intoned Merle. "And he bought me this knife, too."
He displayed it, but merely as a count in the indictment for criminal extravagance. He had gone to the hammock to sit by Winona. He needed her. He had been too long unconsidered.
The sputtering gift-bringer bestowed the orange upon Mrs. Penniman, the album upon Winona, and the invigorator upon the now embarrassed judge.
"Thank you, Wilbur, dear!" Mrs. Penniman was first to recover her poise.
"Thanks ever so much," echoed Winona, doubtfully.
She must first know that he had come by this money righteously. The judge adjusted spectacles to read the label on his gift.
"Thank you, my boy. The stuff may give me temporary relief."
He had felt affronted that any one could suppose one bottle of anything would make a new man of him; and—inconsistently enough—affronted that any one should suppose he needed to be made a new man of. He had not liked the phrase at all.
"And now perhaps you will tell us——" began Winona, her lips again tightening. But the Wilbur twin could not yet be brought down to mere history.
"This is an awful fighting dog," he was saying. "He's called Frank, and he eats them up. Yes, sir, he nearly et up that old Boodles dog just now. He would of if I hadn't stopped him. He minds awful well."
"Spent all our money!" declaimed Merle in a public-school voice, using "our" for the first time since his defeat of the morning. Certain of Winona's support, it had again become their money. "And cursing, swearing, fighting, smoking!"
"Oh, Wilbur!" exclaimed the shocked Winona;