IT happened next day. Afterward Alice believed that it was either second-sight or telepathy that had brought the doleful name of Brewster to her mind.
The Brewsters were three sable-hung and well-to-do maiden ladies who had been a dark cloud on the horizon of Alice's young girlhood. During the time of her engagement, whenever she had specially wished to see Tom alone, the Brewsters, with mourning dripping from them like black seaweed, had appeared. They had, it seemed, an incredible number of relatives, and these relatives had a habit of dying off like flies; and no wonder, Tom had said, for let any one of their numerous tribe be ill and the crape-hung Brewsters, one or more, would appear, with a funereal face, ready to nurse a sufferer through a last illness. They reveled in death-bed scenes. The excitement of their lives was funerals, and they said openly they never expected to go out of mourning.
They had some vague relationship to Alice, and when they descended and asked in funereal tones:
"How is your dear mother to-day?" as though prepared to hear the worst, anger had risen in her heart, for Alice's mother was a young-looking and healthy woman.
When Alice came down the street from the butcher's the next day and saw a strange motor-car in front of her house, her heart sank.
"I hope to heaven," she thought, "whoever they are, they're only calling. I hope they haven't come to stay."
