"You dear, funny Aunt Milly! Don't you know that you're not a bit old? All this time you've been shut away the years have been rolling right past you and have left you untouched. You're going to be the sweetest picture and you're going to be a—surprise, too!"
She was a picture when Nancy's eager fingers had finished with her. The pink of the quaintly fashioned dress was not more pink than the color that flushed her delicate cheeks; into her soft hair Nancy had thrust the shell comb and around her neck hung a chain of tiny corals. Jonathan had returned from Judson's with four bunches of roses and one of them now adorned Miss Milly.
"You're just lovely," Nancy had cried, imprinting a warm kiss upon the blushing cheek.
She awarded the same stamp of approval upon Aunt Sabrina, too, who was very stately in a black silk with one of the Judson roses pinned in the net fichu about her throat.
"And I shall kiss you, too," Nancy called out to B'lindy, catching, through the open door a glimpse of marvellously starched calico.
"You go 'long and keep out from under my feet," had been B'lindy's retort as she retreated from Nancy's threatened attack. "I guess there's work has to be done before this party's over!" But the grumbling in her voice could not conceal her pride and satisfaction.
"Oh, everything is just lovely," Nancy exclaimed, tiptoeing about to add a finishing touch here and there. And indeed, some magic wand seemed to have scattered gladness everywhere about the old place; the great rooms, open now to the sunshine, radiated it in the fragrance of the flowers that Nancy had heaped everywhere.
"I wish it would stay like this," was her unspoken thought.
But in her plans for the party which was to show all Freedom that Happy House was a happy house, Nancy had reckoned without Mrs. Cyrus Eaton.
Since trouble had shadowed Happy House and shut its hospitable doors, time had brought changes to Freedom just as it had to every place on the globe; commerce, trade, politics, a certain democratizing of the standards of living had made their inroads even upon the little village; new families came and old ones died out. And new influences challenged and threatened the old Island aristocracy.