Page:Arthur Stringer-The Loom of Destiny.djvu/51

The Iron Age night—she would groan so loudly and so eloquently with stomach-aches that her father would end up by bringing her a load of good things, for which she would fall on his neck and kiss him a dozen times under his prickly old moustache and make him sit down on the bed and tell her about Custer's Last Stand, while she devoured the last bite and shook the crumbs out of the sheets and turned over and went to sleep quite contented and quite unpunished. More than once, therefore, poor Peggy's mamma wept long and bitterly at her child's unregenerate ways, while Peggy's father admitted she was a little she-devil, and ought to be shut up in a convent, or sent somewhere. Just where he did not know.

So when Peggy's Aunt Frances came to their house for a month or two she was looked upon as the god from the machine in the destiny of Peggy. Frances was just out of her teens, true as steel, and the one being whom Peggy looked up to in awe. This was, as she frankly admitted to Ali Baba, because her Aunt Frankie was beautiful, like 39