Lemuel Fairchild sat still, smoking his wooden pipe, and looking absently, straight ahead, into the papered wall. This habit of gazing at nothing was familiar to them all, and when, at Isabel’s suggestion, the three young people started for a stroll through the orchard path, they left him entirely without ceremony. This was growing to be the rule; no one in the family now consulted him, or took the trouble to be polite to him. He seemed to have become in his own house merely an article of animated furniture, of not much more importance than the rough-furred sickly old cat who dozed his life away back of the stove.

He sat thus in solitude for some time, blankly studying the grotesque patterns in the old-fashioned wall-paper, and drawing mechanically at the pipe in his mouth, unconscious that no smoke came. Thus Miss Sabrina found him when, after a more than ordinarily sharp passage at arms with Alvira, she returned from the Kitchen.

“I swaow! thet girl gits wuss tempered ’n’ more presumin’ ev’ry day o’ her life,” she exclaimed.

“Who—Annie?” asked her brother, rousing himself as if from a nap.

“Annie! nao! who’s talkin’ abaout her?”

“Oh nothin’, unly I was thinkin’ ’baout Annie—‘baout her ’n’ Seth, yeh knaow,” answered Lemuel, apologetically.

“Well, what abaout ’em?” The query was distinctly aggressive in tone.

“Oh, nothin’ much. I was sort o’ thinkin’—well, you knaow S’briny, haow Sissly used to lot on their makin’ a match of it—’n’ I was kine o’ wond’rin’ ef this here notion o’ Seth’s goin’ away wouldn’t knock it all in th’ head.”

“Well?” Miss Sabrina’s monosyllabic comment had so little of sympathy or acquiescence in it, that Lemuel continued in an injured tone and with more animation, not to say resolution:

“Well, I’ve hed kine of an idea o’ goin’ over ’n’ talkin’ it over with M’tildy. Mebbe that’ll be the best thing to dew.”

“Oh you think so, dew yeh? Thet’s all th’ pride you’ve got lef’, is it? I think I see myself goin’ hangin’ raound Matildy Warren, beggin’ her to let her granddaughter marry a Fairchild! I’m ashamed of yeh, Lemuel.”

“I don’ see, much, what ther’ is to be ashamed on.” He added, with the faintest shadow of a grin on his face. “’N’ b’twixt you ’n’ me, I don’t see ’s there’s so blamed much fur me to be praoud abaout, nuther. ‘Tain’t’s if I was goin’ to ask a favor o’ M’tildy, at all. She ’n’ Sissly used to talk ‘baout the thing’s if ’twas settled. ’N’ now’t she’s gone, ’n’ Seth’s talkin’ o’ quittin’ th’ farm, seems to me it’d be the sensible thing to kind o’ fine aout ef M’tildy wouldn’t offer th’ young folks her farm, ef they’d stay.”

“Very well, sir. Hev’ yer own way,” answered Miss Sabrina, with stern formality. “You allus would hev yer own way—and yeh kin go muddle things up to yer heart’s content, for all o’ me!”

Lemuel watched his sister march to the stairs door and close it decisively behind her. He was accustomed of old to this proof of her wrath; as far back as he could remember it had been Sabrina’s habit to figuratively wash her hands of unpleasant complications on the ground-floor by slamming this self-same door, and going up to sulk in her own room. She did it as a young girl, in the first months of her disagreements with his young wife; it seemed to him a most natural proceeding now, when they were both old, gray-headed people.

Just now, it was a relief to him that she had gone, for if she had stayed he might not have had the courage to put his thoughts into actions. As it was he took his hat from its nail back of the kitchen door, and started across-lots for the Warren homestead.





There was no danger of not finding Mrs. Warren at home. For seven or eight years she had scarcely stirred beyond her own door, and for the past eighteen months she had been bed-ridden. The front door was opened to Mr. Fairchild by a young slip of a girl, one of the brood of daughters with which a neighboring poor family was weighted down, and all of whom had been driven to seek work at any price among the farmers of the vicinity. It seemed as if there was a Lawton girl in every other farmhouse the whole length of the Burfield road.

The girl ushered him into the gloomy hall, gloomier than ever now in the gathering twilight, and unceremoniously left him there, while she went to announce his presence. He heard through a door ajar at the end of the hall a thin, querulous voice ask, “Which one of the Fairchilds is it?” and the girl’s reply “The old man.”

Then the servant returned to him and with a curt “Come ahead,” led him to the mistress of the house, who lay in her bed-home, in a recess off the living room.

Mrs. Matilda Warren had never been what might be called a popular woman in the neighborhood. She and her husband, the latter dead now for many years, had come from Massachusetts. They were educated people in a sense, and had not mingled easily with their rougher neighbors. The widow Warren had, after her daughter’s escapade, carried this exclusiveness to a point which the neighborhood found disagreeable. Gradually she had grown into the recluse habit, and younger generations on the hillside, eking out the gossip of their elders with fancies of their own, born of stray glimpses of her tall, gaunt figure and pale face, came to regard her with much that same awe which, two centuries before, reputed witches had for children, young and old.

Something of this feeling Lemuel himself was conscious of, as he stood before her. The coverlet came up close under her arms. She wore a wrapper-dress of red flannel. As he entered she raised herself, with an evidently cruel effort, upon her elbow, dragging the pillow down to aid in supporting her shoulder. She panted with this exertion as she confronted him. Her scanty white hair was combed tightly back from her forehead, and bound in place with a black-velvet band; a natural parting on the side of the hair gave the withered face a suggestion of juvenile jauntiness, in grotesque, jarring contrast with the pale blue eyes which glittered from caverns of dark wrinkles, and the sunken, distorted mouth. She had changed so vastly since their last meeting that Lemuel stood bewildered and silent, staring at her.

She spoke first. “I’m trying to think—it must be twenty year since we’ve met, Lemuel Fairchild.”

“Nigh onto that, M’tildy,” he replied, turning his hat in his hands.

“I didn’t expect ever to lay eyes on you again, I couldn’t come to you, and wouldn’t if I could, and I didn’t dream you would ever show your face here.” The aged woman said this in a high, sharp voice, speaking rapidly and with an ungracious tone.

Lemuel fidgetted with his hat and moved his feet uneasily on the dog-skin rug. “Yeh needn’t be afeered, M’tildy, I wouldn’t hev come naow ef it hadn’t been somethin’ partikler ’baout Annie.”

The invalid raised her shoulder from the pillow with a sudden movement, and bent her head forward. “What’s happened to her? Is she hurt? Tell me, quick!”

“Oh nao, they ain’t nothin’ th’ matter with her. It’s unly ’baout her ’n’ Seth. I kine o’ thought we ought to talk it over ’n’ see haow the land lay. That’s all.”

“Oh that’s it, is it? Samantha!”

Betrayed out of her shrewdness by the suddenness of the summons the servant girl made her immediate appearance through the hall door.

“Yes, I knew you were listening, you huzzy,” said Mrs. Warren grimly. “You get along up stairs, go into Annie’s room, an’ make a noise of some sort on the melodeon till I call you. Not too much noise, mind; jest enough so I can know you’re up there.” As the girl left the room, the invalid explained: “What she don’t hear, the rest of the Lawtons won’t ............