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“I’d like to know what you mean, father.” Thomas’s voice shook with embarrassment and anger.

“I ain’t goin’ to say anything more about it,” replied the old man. “Mary Ann Pease and Arabella Mann are both in the settin’-room with your mother. I thought I’d tell ye, in case ye didn’t want to see ’em, and wanted to go to work on your sermon.”

Thomas made an impatient ejaculation as he strode off. When he reached the large white house where he lived he skirted it carefully. The chirping treble of girlish voices came from the open sitting-room window, and he caught a glimpse of a smooth brown head and a high shell comb in front of the candle-light. The young minister tiptoed in the back door and across the kitchen to the back stairs. The sitting-room door was open, and the candle-light streamed out, and the treble voices rose high. Thomas, advancing through the dusky kitchen with cautious steps, encountered suddenly a chair in the dark corner by the stairs, and just saved himself from falling. There was a startled outcry from the sitting-room, and his mother came running into the kitchen with a candle.

“Who is it?” she demanded, valiantly. Then she started and gasped as her son confronted her. He shook a furious warning fist at the sitting-room door and his mother, and edged towards the stairs. She followed him close. “Hadn’t you better jest step in a minute?” she whispered. “Them girls have been here an hour, and I know they’re waitin’ to see you.” Thomas shook his head fiercely, and swung himself around the corner into the dark crook of the back stairs. His mother thrust the candle into his hand. “Take this, or you’ll break your neck on them stairs,” she whispered.

Thomas, stealing up the stairs like a cat, heard one of the girls call to his mother–“Is it robbers, Mis’ Merriam? Want us to come an’ help tackle ’em?”–and he fairly shuddered; for Evelina’s gentle-lady speech was still in his ears, and this rude girlish call seemed to jar upon his sensibilities.

“The idea of any girl screeching out like that,” he muttered. And if he had carried speech as far as his thought, he would have added, “when Evelina is a girl!”

He was so angry that he did not laugh when he heard his mother answer back, in those conclusive tones of hers that were wont to silence all argument: “It ain’t anything. Don’t be scared. I’m coming right back.” Mrs. Merriam scorned subterfuges. She took always a silent stand in a difficulty, and let people infer what they would. When Mary Ann Pease inquired if it was the cat that had made the noise, she asked if her mother had finished her blue and white counterpane.

The two girls waited a half-hour longer, then they went home. “What do you s’pose made that noise out in the kitchen?” asked Arabella Mann of Mary Ann Pease, the minute they were out-of-doors.

“I don’t know,” replied Mary Ann Pease. She was a broad-backed young girl, and looked like a matron as she hurried along in the dusk.

“Well, I know what I think it was,” said Arabella Mann, moving ahead with sharp jerks of her little dark body.

“What?”

“It was him.”

“You don’t mean–“

“I think it was Thomas Merriam, and he was tryin’ to get up the back stairs unbeknownst to anybody, and he run into something.”

“What for?”

“Because he didn’t want to see us.”

“Now, Arabella Mann, I don’t believe it! He’s always real pleasant to me.”

“Well, I do believe it, and I guess he’ll know it when I set foot in that house again. I guess he’ll find out I didn’t go there to see him! He needn’t feel so fine, if he is the minister; his folks ain’t any better than mine, an’ we’ve got ‘nough sight handsomer furniture in our parlor.”

“Did you see how the tallow had all run down over the candles?”