“Arranged. I have met him. He knows me. We know each other. He knows about you, about Aunt Pea, where we live—”

“Lauretta!”

“Sh!”

“Lauretta,” Sarah whispered, and then spoke in her normal low tone. “You are ‘joking’ me, aren’t you?”

“Dear Sarah—I am in love.”

“But he is an actor. And you cannot really know him?”

“I do. Yes, yes. I do.”

“Lauretta, this is—beyond absurdity. You cannot tell me that you actually have so far forgotten yourself—and Aunt Pea as to—”

“Sh!” Both listened. “I thought I heard—” There was at first no sound, then came the faint, far sound of their aunt’s snoring. They both relaxed visibly. “I said I would meet him tonight… Now. I must go.”

“You shall not!”

“Sarah, you do not command me! Dear Sarah, don’t be unhappy with me?”

“Where are you going?”

“Only to the corner by the pump under the lamp. I said if I could get away, I’d see him there as soon after nine as I could.”

“He must be at the theatre surely.”

“They’re playing Macbeth. He is Banquo and out of it by now. Only the leading actors come out and bow at the end.” Lauretta was at the window again. “There he is! I think it is he—” She moved into the hallway.

“You mustn’t go! I cannot allow you—”

Lauretta embraced her sister briefly. “Sarah, you are a child of seventeen. I am a woman of twenty.”

“Nineteen, and what if Aunt wakes? What will I tell her?”

“She never wakes. Doomsday might trumpet and she would yet out trumpet it with her snoring.”

“She had the headache. She sometimes wakes with that. If she asks for you?”

“She never asks for me. Besides, I shall return in five minutes.”

“Five?”

“Or ten.”

Lauretta had opened the front door and, leaving it open, gone down the path to the gate and out onto the walkway. Sarah went out the front door too and pulled it nearly but not quite to behind her. She had left her sewing in a jumble on the floor where she dropped it, left her mind there with it too. Lauretta had this time taken her genuinely by surprise. She’d had no inkling at all of what had gone on—if what Lauretta said was true and not a romantic fiction, if Lauretta were not “joking” her again.