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When Walter brought the tray with the coffee-pot and the two little cups, Appleton suddenly pushed his chair back, saying: “Let us take our coffee over by the window, shall we, and perhaps I may have a cigarette later? Don’t light the gas, waiter—we want to see the hills and the afterglow.”

There was no avoiding it; Appleton and the waiter conveyed Tommy helplessly over to a table commanding the view and the sunset, and it was the one on which the huge “Engaged” placard reared itself persuasively and suggestively.

“We shall need nothing more, waiter; you may go; I think this will cover the bill,”—and scorning the chair opposite Tommy, Appleton seated himself beside her.

“You have turned your back to the afterglow,” she said, as she reached forward to move “Engaged” to a position a trifle less obvious.

“I don’t care tuppence about the afterglow,” and Appleton covered her hand with his own. “Make it come true, dear, dear Tommy! Make it come true!”

“What?” she asked, between a smile and a tear.

“The placard, dear, the placard! If you should travel the world over, you couldn’t find a man who loves you as I do.”

“What would be the use in my traveling about to find another man when I am so satisfied with this one?” whispered Tommy. “Oh, remember! they may come back at any moment!”

“I will, I will, if only I may have the comfort of holding your hand after all my miserable doubts! I never knew what companionship meant before I met you! I never really cared about life until now.”

“I have always cared about it, but never like this,” confessed Tommy. “You see, I have always been alone, ever since I grew up.”

“And I! How wonderful of Fate to bring us together! And will you let me cable to the churches that you cannot come home just yet?”

“You think I’d better not go—so soon?”

“Without me? Never! You shall go anywhere you like, any time you like, so long as you take me with you. We’ll settle all those things to-morrow—the blessedest day that ever dawned, that’s what to-morrow will be! Couldn’t you marry me to-morrow, Tommy?”

“Certainly not! At any rate—not in the morning!” said Tommy mischievously, withdrawing her hand and moving out of the danger zone.

“And you must remember that your talent is your own, to use as you like!” Appleton continued after a well-filled pause. “Your voice is a unique and precious gift. I’ll try not to be selfish with it, or jealous of it, though if it had half the effect on other men that it has upon me, the floor would be strewn with broken hearts every time you sing!”—and he hummed under his breath:

 
“I hardly know, my darling,
What mostly took my heart,
Unless perhaps your singing
Has done the greater part.”
 

“Oh, you dear absurdity!” said Tommy, twinkling and sparkling enchantingly.—“I wish the waiter wouldn’t come in every time I want to say something especially private!”

“‘Confound his politics, frustrate his knavish tricks,’ but we shall soon be out of his reach, spinning along to the palace.”

“Are we going there? Oh! I shall be afraid to tell the bishop and Mrs. Kennion!”

“You needn’t be. I told Mrs. Kennion this afternoon that I loved you to distraction. If the bishop is back from Bath, she’ll have passed on the information by now.”

“I was just going to say, when the waiter came so near, that it isn’t the public I love, it’s the singing! Just to sing and sing, that’s what I long to do!”

“And what you shall do, so help me! You know you wanted me to find a new name for you? Wasn’t I clever to think of Appleton?”

“Very! And you’re kindly freeing me of half of my ‘bizarre Americanism,’ as my Torquay correspondent called it. How shall we deal with Thomasina?”

“We’ll call her Tommy. A darling, kissable little name, Tommy!—No, I’m not going to do anything!”

“You don’t think it’s cowardly of me to marry you?”

“Cowardly?”

“Yes, when I haven’t actually proved that I can earn my living; at least, I haven’t done it long enough, or well enough, yet.”

“I think it’s brave of you to marry me.”

“Brave?”

“To turn your back on a possible career.”

“It’s not the ‘careering’ that I love; though it will seem very strange when Tommy Tucker doesn’t have to sing for her supper!—Shall we go? The waiter is coming in again. I believe he thinks we are going to run off with the spoons!”

“So we are! At least, when we go, the spoons will go! I know it’s a poor joke, but I am too happy to be brilliant. Call the head waiter, please,”—this to Walter, who despaired of ever getting rid of his guests, and was agreeably disappointed that a gentleman who had not ordered wine should ask for Gustave.

Appleton took the “Engaged” placard off the table and used it nonchalantly as a fan in crossing the room. Then as he drew near the men he slipped two gold pieces into Tommy’s hand.

“May I carry away this placard, waiter?” he asked, as if it were quite a sane request. “I’ve taken a fancy to it as a souvenir of a most delightful and memorable dinner.”

“Assuredly, assuredly!” murmured Gustave. He knew that there was romance in the air, although he did not perceive the exact point of Appleton’s request.

“The young lady will reward you for your courtesy. No; I’ll help with her jacket, thank you.”

Tommy, overcome with laughter and confusion and blushes, pressed the gold pieces into the hands of the astonished waiters, who bowed almost to the floor.

“You are always giving me sovereigns, dear Fergus,” she whispered with a laugh and something like a sob, as they drove along in the delicious nearness provided by the hansom.

“Never mind,” said Fergus. “You will be giving me one when you marry me!”

THE TURNING-POINT

Not far from the village of Bonny Eagle, on the west bank of the Saco, stood two little low-roofed farmhouses; the only two that had survived among others of the same kind that once dotted the green brink of the river.

Long years before, in 1795 or thereabouts, there had been a cluster of log houses on this very spot, known then as the Dalton Right Settlement, and these in turn had been succeeded at a later date by the more comfortable frame-roof farmhouses of the period.

In the old days, before the sound of the axe for the first time disturbed the stillness of the forest, the otter swam in the shadowy coves near the shore and the beaver built his huts near by. The red deer came down to dip his antlers and cool his flanks in the still shallows. The speckled grouse sat on her nest in the low pine boughs, while her mate perched on the mossy logs by the riverside unmolested.

The Sokokis built their bark wigwams here and there on the bank, paddling their birch canoes over the river’s smooth surface, or threading the foamy torrents farther down its course.

Here was the wonderful spring that fed, and still feeds, Aunt Judy’s Brook, the most turbulent little stream in the county. Many a moccasin track has been made in the soft earth around the never-failing fountain, and many the wooden bucket lowered into its crystal depths by the Dalton Righters when in their turn they possessed the land.

The day of the Indian was over now, and the day of the farmer who succeeded him was over, too. The crash of the loom and the whir of the spinning-wheel were heard no longer, but Amanda Dalton, spinster,—descendant of the original Tristram Dalton, to whom the claim belonged,—sat on alone in her house, and not far away sat Caleb Kimball, sole living heir of the original Caleb, himself a Dalton Righter, and contemporary of Tristram Dalton.

Neither of these personages took any interest in pedigree or genealogy. They knew that their ancestors had lived and died on the same acres now possessed by them, but the acres had dwindled sadly, and the ancestors had seemingly left little for which to be grateful. Indeed, in Caleb’s case they had been a distinct disadvantage, since the local sense of humor, proverbially strong in York County, had always preserved a set of Kimball stories among its most cherished possessions. Some of them might have been forgotten in the century and a half that had elapsed, if the Caleb of our story had not been the inheritor of certain family traits famous in their day and generation.

Caleb the first had been the “cuss” of his fellow farmers, because in coming from Scarboro to join the Dalton Righters he had brought whiteweed with the bundle of hay for his cattle when he was clearing the land. The soil of this particular region must have been especially greedy for, and adapted to, this obnoxious grass-killer, for it flourished as in no other part of the county; flourishes yet, indeed—though, if one can forget that its presence means poor feed for cattle where might be a crop of juicy hay, the blossoming fields of the old Dalton Settlement look, in early June, the loveliest, most ethereal, in New England. There, a million million feathery daisies sway and dance in the breeze, lifting their snowy wheels to the blue June sky. There they grow and thrive, the slender green stalks tossing their pearly disks among sister groves of buttercups till the eye is fairly dazzled with the symphony of white and gold. The back-aching farmers of the original Dalton Settlement had indeed tried to root out the lovely pests, but little did our Caleb care! If he had ever trod his ancestral acres either for pleasure or profit he might in time have “stomped out” the whiteweed, so the neighbors said, for he had the family foot, the size of an anvil; but he much preferred a sedentary life, and the whiteweed went on seeding itself from year to year.

Caleb was tall, loose-jointed, and black as a thunder-cloud—the swarthy skin, like the big foot, having been bequeathed to him by the original Caleb, whose long-legged, shaggy-haired sons had been known as “Caleb’s colts.” Tall and black, all of them, the “colts,” so black that the village wits said the Kimball children must have eaten smut and soot and drunk cinder tea during the years their parents were clearing the land. Tall and black also were all the Kimball daughters, so tall it was their boast to be able to look out over the tops of the window curtains; and proud enough of their height to cry with rage when any rival Amazon came into the neighborhood.

Whatever else they were or were not, however, the Kimballs had always been industrious and frugal. It had remained for the last scion of the old stock to furnish a byword for slackness. In a village where stories of outlandish, ungodly, or supernatural laziness were sacredly preserved from year to year, Caleb Kimball’s indolence easily took the palm. His hay commonly went to seed in the field. His cow yielded her morning’s milk about noon, and her evening “mess” was taken from her (when she was lucky) by the light of a lantern. He was a bachelor of forty-five, dwelt alone, had no visitors and made his living, such as it was, off the farm, with the help of a rack-o’-bones horse. He had fifty acres of timber-land, and when his easy-going methods of farming found him without money he simply sold a few trees.

The house and barn were gradually falling into ruins; the farm implements stood in the yard all winter, and the sleigh all summer. The gate flapped on its hinges, the fences were broken down, and the stone walls were full of gaps. His pipe, and a snarling rough-haired dog, were his only companions. Hour after hour he sat on the side steps looking across the sloping meadows that separated his place from Amanda Dalton’s; hour after hour he puffed his pipe and gazed on the distant hills and the sparkling river; gazed and gazed—whether he saw anything or thought anything, remembered anything, or even dreamed anything, nobody could guess, not even Amanda Dalton, who was good at guessing, having very few other mental recreations to keep her mother-wit alive.

Caleb Kimball, as seen on his doorstep from Amanda Dalton’s sink window, was but a speck, to be sure, but he was her nearest neighbor; if a person whose threshold you never cross, and who never crosses yours, can be called a neighbor. There were seldom or never meetings or greetings between the two, yet each unconsciously was very much alive to the existence of the other. In days or evenings of solitude one can make neighbors of very curious things.

The smoke of Amanda’s morning fire cried “Shame” to Caleb’s when it issued languidly from his kitchen chimney an hour later. Amanda’s smoke was like herself, and betokened the brisk fire she would be likely to build; Caleb’s showed wet wood, poor draught, a fallen brick in the chimney.

Later on in the morning Caleb’s dog would sometimes saunter down the road and have a brief conversation with Amanda’s cat. They were neither friends nor enemies, but merely enlivened a deadly, dull existence with a few casual remarks on current topics.

Once Caleb had possessed a flock of hens, but in the course of a few years they had dwindled to one lonely rooster, who stalked gloomily through the wilderness of misplaced objects in the Kimball yard, and wondered why he had been born.

Amanda pitied him, and flung him a surreptitious handful of corn from her apron pocket when she met him walking dejectedly in the road halfway between the two houses. So encouraged he extended his rambles, and one afternoon Amanda, looking out of her window, saw him stop at her gate and hold a tête-à-tête with one of her Plymouth Rock hens. The interview was brief but effective. In a twinkling he had told her of his miserable life and his abject need of sympathy.

“There are times,” he said, “when, I give you my word, I would rather be stewed for dinner than lead my present existence! It is weak for me to trouble you with my difficulties, but you have always understood me from the first.”

“Say no more,” she replied. “I am a woman and pity is akin to love. The fowls of Amanda Dalton’s flock do not need me as you do. Eleven eggs a day are laid here regularly, and I will go where my egg will be a daily source of pleasure and profit.”

“The coop is draughty and the corn scarce,” confessed the rooster, doing his best to be noble.

“I am of the sex created especially to supply companionship,” returned the hen, “therefore I will accompany you, regardless of personal inconvenience.”

Amanda saw the departure of the eloping couple and pursued them not.

“Land sakes!” she exclaimed, “if any male thing hereabouts has sprawl enough to go courtin’ I’m willin’ to encourage ’em. She’ll miss her clean house and good food, I guess, but I ain’t sure. She’s ‘women-folks’ after all, and I shouldn’t wonder a mite but she’d take real comfort in makin’ things pleasanter up there for that pindlin’, God-forsaken old rooster! She’ll have her hands full, but there, I know what ’tis to get along with empty ones!”

There were not many such romances or comedies as these to enliven Amanda’s mornings. Then afternoon would slip into twilight, darkness would creep over the landscape, and Amanda’s light—clear, steady, bright, serene—would gleam from its place on the sink shelf through the kitchen window, over the meadow, “up to Kimball’s.” It was such a light as would stream from a well-trimmed lamp with a crystal clean chimney, but it met with small response from its neighbor’s light during many months of the year. In late autumn and winter there would be a fugitive candle gleam upstairs in the Kimball house, and on stormy evenings a dull, smoky light in the living-room.

From the illumination in the Dalton sink window, Caleb thought Amanda sat in the kitchen evenings, but she didn’t. She said she kept the second light there because she could afford it, and because the cat liked it. The cat enjoyed the black haircloth sofa in the sitting-room, afternoons, but she greatly preferred the kitchen for evening use; it made a change, and the high-backed cushioned rocker was then vacant. Amanda had nobody to consider but the cat, so she naturally deferred to her in every possible way. It was bad for the cat’s character, but at least it kept Amanda from committing suicide, so what would you? Here was a woman of insistent, unflagging, unending activity. Amanda Dalton had energy enough to attend to a husband and six children—cook, wash, iron, churn, sew, nurse—and she lived alone with a cat. The village was a mile, and her nearest female neighbor, the Widow Thatcher, a half-mile away. She had buried her only sister in Lewiston years before, and she had not a relation in the world. All her irrepressible zeal went into the conduct of her house and plot of ground. Day after day, week after week, year after year, the established routine was carried through. First the washing of the breakfast dishes and the putting to rights of the kitchen, which was radiantly clean before she began upon it. Next her bedroom; the stirring-up of the cornhusk mattress, the shaking of the bed of live geese feathers, the replacing of cotton sheets, homespun blankets, and blue-and-white counterpane. Next came the sitting-room with its tall, red, flag-bottomed chairs, its two-leaved table, its light stand that held the Bible and work-basket and lamp. The chest of drawers and tall clock were piously dusted, and the frames of the Family Register, “Napoleon Crossing the Alps,” and “Maidens Welcoming Washington in the Streets of Alexandria,” were carefully wiped off. Once a week the parlor was cleaned, the tarlatan was lifted from the two plaster Samuels on the mantelpiece, their kneeling forms were cleaned with a damp cloth, the tarlatan replaced, and the parlor closed again reverently. There was kindling to chop, wood to bring in, the modest cooking, washing, ironing, and sewing to do, the flower-beds to weed, and the little vegetable garden to keep in order.

But Amanda had a quick foot, a neat hand, a light touch, and a peculiar faculty of “turning off” work so that it simply would not last through the day. Why did she never think of going to the nearest city and linking her powers with those of some one who would put them to larger uses? Simply because no one ever did that sort of thing in Bonny Eagle in those days. Girls crowded out of home by poverty sought employment here and there, but that a woman of forty, with a good home and ten acres of land—to say nothing of coupon bonds that yielded a hundred dollars a year in cash—that such a one should seek a larger field in a strange place, would have been thought flying in the face of Providence, as well as custom.

Outside Bonny Eagle, in the roar and din and clamor of cities, were all sorts of wrongs that needed righting, wounds that cried out to be healed. There were motherless children, there were helpless sufferers moaning for the sight of a green field, but the superfluous females of Amanda Dalton’s day had not awakened to any sense of responsibility with regard to their unknown brothers and sisters.

Amanda was a large-hearted woman. She would have shared her soda biscuit, her bean soup, her dandelion greens, her hogshead cheese, her boiled dinner, her custard pie, with any hungry mortal, but no one in Bonny Eagle needed bite nor sup. Therefore she feather-stitched her dish-towels, piled her kindling in a “wheel pattern” in the shed, named her hens and made friends of them, put fourteen tucks in her unbleached cotton petticoats, and fried a pancake every Saturday for her cat.

“It’s either that or blow your brains out, if you’ve got a busy mind!” she said grimly to Susan Benson, her best friend, who was passing a Saturday afternoon with her. It was chilly and they liked the cheerful warmth of the Saturday fire that was baking the beans and steaming the brown bread.

Susan unrolled her patchwork and, giving a flip to the cat with her thimble finger, settled herself comfortably in the kitchen rocker.

The cat leaped down and stalked into the next room with an air of offended majesty, as much as to say: “Of all the manners I ever saw, that woman has the worst! She contrives to pass by three empty chairs and choose the one I chance to be occupying!”

“You wouldn’t be so lonesome if you could see a bit of life from your house, Mandy,” said Mrs. Benson. “William an’ I were sayin’ last night you’d ought to move into the village winters, though nothin’ could be handsomer than the view from your sink window this minute. Daisies, daisies everywhere! How do you manage to keep ’em out o’ your place, Mandy, when they’re so thick on Caleb Kimball’s?”

“I just root an’ root, an’ keep on rootin’,” Amanda responded cheerfully, “though I don’t take a mite o’ pride out of it, for the better my place looks the worse his does, by comparison.”

“It is a sight!” said Mrs. Benson, standing for a moment by the sink and looking up to Kimball’s.

“I went up there one night after dark, when I knew Caleb ’d gone to Hixam, an’ I patched up some o’ the holes in his stone wall, thinkin’ his whiteweed seeds wouldn’t blow through quite so thick!”—and Amanda joined Mrs. Benson at the window. “I’d ’a’ done a day’s work on his side o’ the wall as lief as not, only I knew folks would talk if they saw me.”

“Land, no, they wouldn’t, Mandy. Everybody knows you wouldn’t take him if he was the last man on earth; an’ as for Caleb, I guess he wouldn’t marry any woman above ground, not if she was a seraphim. I used to think he’d spunk up some time or other, when he got over his mother’s death; but it’s too late now, I’m afraid.”

“Caleb set great store by his mother; that’s one good thing about him,” said Amanda.

“He did for certain,” agreed Mrs. Benson. “If that girl he was engaged to hadn’t ’a’ spoken disrespectful to her in his hearin’ there’d ’a’ been a wife an’ children up there now an’ the place would ’a’ looked diff’rent.”

“Not so very diff’rent! He didn’t lose much in Eliza Johnson. I guess he knows that by now!” remarked Amanda serenely; “though I s’pose ’t was quarrelin’ with her that set him runnin’ down hill, all the same.”

“I never thought he cared anything about Eliza. She was determined to have him, an’ he was too lazy to say no, but you see in the end she only got her labor for her pains. The Kimball boys never had any luck with their love affairs. When Caleb an’ his mother was left alone, she was terrible anxious for him to marry. She was allers findin’ girls for him, but part of ’em wouldn’t look at him, and he wouldn’t make up to any of ’em.”

“I was livin’ in Lewiston those years,” said Amanda.

“I remember you was. Well, when old Mrs. Kimball broke her arm, Charles, the youngest son, that was a stage-driver, determined he’d get somebody for Caleb, for his own wife wouldn’t lift her finger to help ’bout the house. He saw a girl up to Steep Falls that he kind o’ liked the looks of, an’ he offered her a ride down to his mother’s to spend the day, thinkin’ if the family liked her she might do for Caleb. However, her eyes was weak an’ she didn’t know how to milk, so they thought she’d better go home by train. That would ’a’ been fair enough for both parties, but when Charles drove her to the station he charged her fifteen cents an’ it made an awful sight o’ talk. She had a hot temper, an’ she kind o’ resented it!”

“I dare say ’t wa’n’t so,” commented Amanda; “but everybody’s dead that could deny it, except Caleb, and he wouldn’t take the trouble.”

“It’s one of the days when he’s real drove, ain’t it?” asked Susan sarcastically, as she looked across the field to the wood-pile where a gray-shirted figure sat motionless. “If ever a man needed a wife to patch the seat of his pants, it’s Caleb Kimball! I guess it’s the only part of his clothes he ever wears out. He wa’n’t like that before his mother died; the wheels seemed to stop in him then an’ there. He was queer an’ strange an’ shy, but I never used to think he’d develop into a reg’lar hermit. She’d turn in her grave, Mis’ Kimball would, to see him look as he does. I don’t s’pose he gets any proper nourishment. The smartest man in the world won’t take the trouble to make pie for himself, yet he’ll eat it ’s long ’s he can stan’ up! Caleb’s mother was a great pie-baker. I can see her now, shovelin’ ’em in an’ out o’ the oven Saturdays, with her three great black lanky boys standin’ roun’ waitin’ for ’em to cool off.—‘Only one, mother?’ Caleb used to say, kind o’ wheedlin’ly, while she laughed up at him leanin’ against the door-frame.—‘What’s one blueb’ry pie amongst me?’”

“He must ’a’ had some fun in him once,” smiled Amanda.

“They say women-folks ain’t got no sense o’ humor,” remarked Mrs. Benson, with a twitch of her thread. “I notice the men that live without ’em don’t seem to have any! We may not amount to much, but we’re somethin’ to laugh at.”

“Why don’t you bake him a pie now an’ then, an’ send it up, Susan?” asked Amanda.

“Well, there, I don’t feel I hardly know him well enough, though William does. I dare say he wouldn’t like it, an’ he’d never think to return the plate, so far away.—Besides, there never is an extry pie in a house where there’s a man an’ three boys; which reminds me I’ve got to go home an’ make one for breakfast, with nothin’ to make it out of.”

“I could lend you a handful o’ dried plums.”

“Thank you; I’ll take ’em an’ much obliged. I declare it seems to me, now the rhubarb’s ’bout gone, as if the apples on the trees never would fill out enough to drop off. There does come a time in the early summer, after you’re sick of mince, ’n’ squash, ’n’ punkin, ’n’ cranberry, ’n’ rhubarb, ’n’ custard, ’n’ ’t ain’t time for currant, or green apple, or strawb’ry, or raspb’ry, or blackb’ry—there does come a time when it seems as if Providence might ’a’ had a little more ingenuity in plannin’ pie-fillin’!—You might bake a pie for Caleb now an’ then yourself, Mandy; you’re so near.”

“Mrs. Thatcher lives half a mile away,” replied Amanda; “but I couldn’t carry Caleb Kimball a pie without her knowin’ it an’ makin’ remarks. I’d bake one an’ willin’ if William ’d take it to him; but there, ’t would only make him want another. He’s made his bed an’ he’s got to lie on it.”

“He lays on his bed sure enough, an’ most o’ the time probably—but do you believe he ever makes it?”

Amanda shuddered. “I don’t know, Susan; it’s one o’ the things that haunts me; whether he makes it or whether he don’t.”

“Do you ever see any wash hung out?” Mrs. Benson’s needle stopped in midair while she waited for Amanda’s answer.

“Ye-es; now an’ then.”

“What kind?”

“Sheets; once a gray blanket; underclothes; but naturally I don’t look when they’re hung out. He generally puts ’em on the grass, anyway.”

“Well, it’s a sin for a man to live so in a Christian country, an’ the kindest thing to say about him is that he’s crazy. Some o’ the men folks over to the store declare he is crazy; but William declares he ain’t. He says he’s asleep. William kind o’ likes him. Does he ever pass the time o’ day with you?”

“Hardly ever. I meet him once or twice a year, maybe, in the road. He bows when I go past on an errand an’ holds on to his dog when he tries to run out an’ bite me.”

“That’s real kind o’ gentlemanly,” observed Susan.

“I never thought of it that way,” said Amanda absently; “but perhaps it is. All I can say is, Caleb Kimball’s a regular thorn in my flesh. I can’t do anything for him, an’ I can’t forget him, right under foot as he is—his land joinin’ mine. Mornin’, noon, an’ night for years I’ve wanted to get into that man’s house an’ make it decent for him; wanted to milk the cow the right time o’ day; feed the horse; weed the garden; scrub the floor; wash the windows; black the stove.”

“How you do go on, Mandy!” exclaimed Mrs. Benson. “What diff’rence does it make to you how dirty he is, so long’s you’re clean?”

“It does make a diff’rence, an’ it always will. I hate to see the daisies growin’ so thick, knowin’ how he needs hay. I want to root ’em out same’s I did mine, after I’d been away three years in Lewiston. I hate to take my pot o’ beans out o’ the oven Saturday nights an’ know he ain’t had gumption enough to get himself a Christian meal. Livin’ alone ’s I do, Susan, things ‘bulk up’ in my mind bigger’n they’d ought to.”

“They do so,” agreed Susan; “an’ you mustn’t let ’em. You must come over to our house oftener. You know William loves to have you, an’ so do the boys. The Bible may insinuate we are our brother’s keeper, but we can’t none of us help it if he won’t be kept!—There, I must be gettin’ home. I’ve had considerable many reminders the last half-hour that it’s about time! It’s none o’ my business, Mandy, but you do spoil that cat, an’ the time’s not far off when he won’t be a mite o’ comfort to you. Of course, I’m too intimate here to take offense, but if the minister should happen to set in this chair when he calls, an’ see that cat promenade round an’ round the rockers an’ then rustle off into the settin’-room as mad as Cuffy, he’d certainly take notice an’ think he wa’n’t a welcome visitor.”

“Like mistress, like cat!” sighed Amanda. “Tristram an’ I get awful set in our ways.”

“Kind o’ queer, Mandy, namin’ a cat for your grandfather,” Mrs. Benson observed anxiously as she opened the door. “William an’ me don’t want you to get queer.”

“I ain’t got anything better ’n a cat to name for grandfather,” said poor Amanda, in a tone that set her friend Susan thinking as she walked homeward.

The summer wore along and there came a certain Tuesday different from all the other Tuesdays in that year, or in all the forty years that had gone before—a Tuesday when the Kimball side door was not opened in the morning. No smoke issued from the chimney all day. The rooster and his kidnapped hen flew up from the steps and pecked at the door panels vigorously. Seven o’clock in the evening came, then eight, and no light to be seen anywhere. The dog howled; the horse neighed; the cow lowed ominously in the closed barn. At nine o’clock Amanda took a lantern and sped across the field, found a pail in the shed, slipped into the barn, milked the cow, gave the beasts hay and water, and leaving the pail of milk on the steps, went quietly home again, anxious lest she had done too much, anxious also lest she had not done enough.

Next morning she stationed herself at her kitchen window and took account of her signs. The milk-pail was overturned on the steps, the rooster and hen perching on the rim, but there was no smoke coming from the chimney. She thought quickly as she did everything else. She waited long enough to make a cup of coffee, then she slipped out of her door and up to Kimball’s. Her apron was full of kindling, and on her arm she carried a basket with a package of herbs, a tiny bottle of brandy, one of cologne, some arrowroot and matches, a cake of hard soap and a clean towel, bones for the dog and corn for the hen.