“At least it’s all in the family,” he repeated several times, after they got to Grandma’s.

Grandma was sitting in her bay window in a housedress, fanning herself with a large souvenir palm leaf fan decorated with a lively picture of Teddy Roosevelt leading the Rough Riders. She was not wearing her transformation, but had her gray hair done in curl papers, with a black velvet bow thrust in the midst to brighten it up. She had the newspaper in her lap, and kept looking at it and shaking her head.

“Lena must have gone straight to Cleveland and met their train,” Papa said. “Now how do you suppose that little devil knew when they were coming when nobody else did?”

“Maybe she stopped in the telegraph office and Vance Hawkins showed her the telegrams,” Grandma suggested. “I can’t get over their getting married without telling me. Goodness knows, I’ve been trying to bring them together for years, then I just gave up. Mr. Sweeney has always been mighty lovely to me though, mighty lovely indeed. I don’t know where I’d be without him.”

Mrs. Carmel’s head popped out of the bedroom door. She was taking a “bird bath,” as she expressed it, and continued to push a washcloth over her sharp old face as she talked.

“I tell Mrs. Reed she could have got Mr. Sweeney any day she held out her little finger,” she declared. “What that man didn’t do for her!”

“Now, now,” Grandma said, blushing. “I don’t say Mr. Sweeney didn’t say a great many things to me that sometimes made me think. But Lois is more up-and-coming, and when she sets out to get somebody, anybody else has got to take a backseat.”

“It takes a load off my mind about Lena, I can tell you,” Papa confessed. “That kid is just as pigheaded as her Aunt Lois, and hell knows what she would do when she set her mind to it. I haven’t slept a wink till I read this.”

“Children always turn up,” Grandma said comfortably. “Mine were always running away, and for that matter some of them stayed away, but there was always plenty more running around asking for cookies.”

“It ain’t the ones that run away you worry about,” Mrs. Carmel interpolated, popping her head in again. “It’s the ones that stay home. They’re the ones, all right. Never get married if they’re girls, never keep a job if they’re boys. No, sir, the ones that run away do all right.”

Papa asked Grandma if Ed Hartwell had been in to see her lately, and if he ever did show up to be sure and tell him about Lois marrying Sweeney. He said it was one on Ed, all right.

“Ed was pretty stuck on Lois,” Papa said. “Lois was pretty soft on him too, but they couldn’t stand up to Mabel. She’d have filled them both full of buckshot. A fella ought to think about the future when he takes up with a girl like Mabel. They ain’t so bad when you marry them—I mean, take a girl like Mabel—but when you don’t you’re in for it. I don’t think Lois ever cared for Sweeney the way she did for Ed. I guess she just gave up, being on toward thirty-six, -seven, and figuring that Sweeney has plenty of dough.”