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Neither to Emmy nor to her mother was there a doubt that any word passed would be kept. Mrs. Darter, in the lost days of peace, before her vagaries had corroded her affection, had said once, “Emmy never told me a lie in her life, nor she never broke a promise she made me!”

Emmy shut her lips tight and looked out of the window. Her troubled gaze did not note the dewy freshness of the morning on turf and tree. The houses were brown cottages for the most part, built in the lean period of western rural architecture when a stunted cruciform effect and a bescrolled piazza was the model for every village. But the ugly lines of wood were veiled by a kindly wealth of wistarias and clematis royally flaunting, by Virginia-creeper and trumpet-vines splashed with vermilion and yellow; the grass was velvet, there was a gay company of geraniums prospering in every garden; and below the hills and the tree-tops lay the lovely, dimpled hill-sides, golden with wheat or shorn to a varnished silver like nothing so much as the hue of shining flax, and the waving fields of corn–all under a vault of burning blue, delicate, tender, innocent, with no sumptuous and threatening richness of cloud betokening storm, only high in the heavens the milky white cumuli, the “harvest clouds.”

There were a thousand witcheries of light and shade, there was a radiant lavishness of color; it was a landscape like a multitude all over the Middle West, nevertheless a sight to make the heart beat the quicker for sheer delight. But it might have been a stone wall for anything poor Emmy, who loved each growing thing, saw in it this moment. To live without Bert, perhaps to learn that Susy Baker had the love which she would seem to have flung away–Emmy would have groaned if she had not heard Mrs. Darter’s piteous din, and thought grimly that her mother did enough groaning for their small family!

Yet at this very instant of despair a minister of grace was lifting the latch of the Darter gate, and Emmy was unconsciously eying her. The minister of grace was short of stature and very plump. She had a round, fair, freckled face, which looked the rounder for its glittering spectacles. Her hair was a yellowish gray, but she covered it with a small white sailor hat. She wore a neat brown and white calico frock. To escape the dew she held her skirts high; one could see that her preference was for black alpaca slippers and white cotton stockings. The minister’s name was Miss Ann Bigelow.

“Now she comes to stir mother up worse!” thought Emmy. So blind are we to the future. But she opened the door for Miss Ann Bigelow, and bade her welcome, and proffered her the best rocking-chair in the parlor and a palm-leaf fan.

Miss Bigelow’s countenance was beaming like an electric light.

“I really had to come!” she exclaimed so soon as she could take breath. “Have you heard about Mrs. Conner spraining her ankle?”

“Emmy, open the door!” moaned Mrs. Darter from within–her bed-room adjoined the parlor. Emmy opened the door, while she said: “I’m so sorry. When? How is she?”

“Oh, she’s all right now!” said Miss Bigelow. “It’s wonderful–a real miracle, I told sister. That’s what I came to tell you. She sent over for us, and there she lay, flat on the kitchen floor. I begun to treat her in my mind the minute I saw her, for I saw she was in error. All her word was: ‘Send for a doctor; it’s sprained, if it ain’t broke!’ I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to encourage her in error, and yet you know we are not advanced so far as sprains and broken bones, and it is usual to summon a doctor; and I don’t feel I’m advanced enough myself to undertake serious cases; I’m too weak and timid, and I haven’t the spiritual vision. Emmy, does your mother always groan that loud way? Is she in pain? I mean, does she think she is in pain?”