At this point Aunt
Elizabeth, with her red hair and pink frock, had interfered and lured
off the Goward, who behaved in a manner which appeared to me to reduce
him to a negligible quantity. But the family evidently did not think
so, for they all promptly began to interfere, Maria and Charles Edward
and Alice and even Billy, each one with an independent plan, either to
lure the Goward back or to eliminate him. Alice had the most original
idea, which was to marry Peggy to Dr. Denbigh; but this clashed with
Maria's idea, which was to entangle the doctor with Aunt Elizabeth in
order that the Goward might be recaptured. It was all extremely
complicated and unnecessary (from my point of view), and of course it
transpired and circulated through the gossip of the town, and poor
Peggy was much afflicted and ashamed. Now the engagement was off; Aunt
Elizabeth had gone into business with a clairvoyant woman in New York;
Goward was in the hospital with a broken arm, and Peggy was booked to
go to Europe on Saturday with Charles Edward and Lorraine.
"Quite right," I exclaimed at this point in the story. "Everything has
turned out just as it should, like a romance in an old-fashioned
ladies' magazine."
"Not at all," broke out Talbert; "you don't know the whole of it, Maria
has told me" (oh, my prophetic soul, Maria!) "that Charley and his wife
have asked a friend of theirs, a man named Dane, ten years older than
Peggy, a professor in that blank coeducational college, to go with
them, and that she is sure they mean to make her marry him.
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