“I know that trick,” Sarah said. “You are trying to make me feel sorry for you and sympathize so that I shall agree with your next suggestion. What is it? That we slip out and walk around the block when we hear Aunt Pea begin to snore?”

“Are you content with so little?”

Sarah smiled. “That’s the next part of the trick, wistful appeal couched as question-accusation. I am content, yes, and what we have and are is not ‘so little’.”

Lauretta held up her hands. “Do not, I pray you, lecture me on Christian gratitude.”

Sarah took up her sewing, having to study it to find her place as she would have a book, so little was her mind on the embroidery. “We have a good home, for which I am grateful.”

Five minutes later Lauretta said, “I wish I were like you.”

“No, you do not,” Sarah said.

“Yes, I do. Sometimes.”

“Only when something frightens you.” She looked up at her sister with quick concern. “Has anything?”

“No, Sarah. Dear Sarah.”

Sarah loosened the wooden hoops and reset them to include a new, undone area. “I can’t decide between blue and lavender there, so I shall come back to it. I know this must be green.”

“Not frightened.”

Sarah looked up again, half anxious, half suspecting that her sister was at her familiar game of making drama. “Not frightened,” she said as a statement, and waited with seeming unconcern.

Lauretta went into the hallway and stood listening for a few moments, then returned. “Asleep,” she said and smiled. “So noisily asleep it is a wonder she does not wake and tell herself to be quiet so that she can sleep.”

“Would you like to walk around the block?” Sarah asked. “There’d be no harm in that.”

“Do you remember,” Lauretta began, smiling, “do you remember when we were girls and first came to live with Aunt Pea? Sometimes we filled an old stocking with rags and hid in the hedge and dragged it across the front walk when the night watchmen made their rounds?”

“I do remember.” They laughed without making much sound.

“Sarah, I must tell you. I have met Mr. Savage.”

“Yes, dear,” Sarah agreed calmly. “We both enjoyed his performance last Friday evening, and you contrived it so that we were in Chippewa Square the next afternoon at the time he was likely to arrive at the theatre for the special matinee performance. He smiled, I remember, seeing us, but that is not remarkable, since you are so very pretty. And Mr. Savage is, I should think, used to smiling at admirers who contrive ‘accidentally’ to be in his way. I know your penchant for romantic dreaming. It is harmless, so long as it remains romantic dreaming.”

“I have seen him twice since.”

“By chance, naturally,” Sarah said after a brief pause.