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An infant hope stirred in her heart when she saw a red sparkle here and there on the sooty bottom of the tea-kettle, and it grew a little when her mother remarked that the dishwater boiled away so fast and the cows lay down so much that she believed it would rain the next day. When, that same afternoon, the welcome shower came with scarce ten minutes’ warning, Huldah could hardly believe her eyes and ears. She jumped from her couch of anguish and remorse like an excited kitten, darted out of the house unmindful of the lightning, drove the Jersey calf under cover, chased the chickens into the coop, bolstered up the tomatoes so that the wind and rain would not blow the fruit from the heavily laden plants, opened the blinds and closed the windows.

“It comes from the east,” she cried, dancing up and down in a glow of childish glee–“it comes from the east, and it’s blowing in on Jennie’s side of the buggy!” She did not know that Pitt had changed places with his bride, and that his broad shoulder was shielding her from the “angry airt.”

Then she flew into the kitchen and pinned up her blown hair in front of the cracked looking-glass, thinking with sympathetic tenderness how pretty she looked, with her crown of chestnut tendrils tightened by the dampness, her round young cheeks crimsoned by the wind, and her still tearful eyes brightened by unchristian joy. She remembered with naughty satisfaction how rain invariably straightened Jennie Perkins’s frizzes, and was glad, glad that it did. Her angry passions were so beautifying that the radiant vision in the glass almost dazzled her. It made her very sorry for Pitt too. She hated to think that his ill-temper and stubborn pride and obstinacy had lost him such a lovely creature as herself, and had forced him to waste his charms on so unappreciative and plain a person as Jennie Perkins. She remembered that Pitt had asked her to marry him coming home from the fair in a rainstorm. If he meant anything he said on that occasion, he must be suffering pangs of regret to-day. Oh, how good, how sweet, how kind of it to rain and support her in what she had prophesied of Saturday weather!

All at once a healing thought popped into her head. “I shall not live many years,” she reflected–“not after losing Pitt, and having his mother crow over me, and that hateful Jennie Perkins, having the family hair wreath hanging over her sofa, and my wedding ring on her hand; but so long as I live I will keep account of rainy Saturdays, and find a way to send the record to Pitt every New Year’s Day just to prove that I was right. Then I shall die young, and perhaps he will plant something on my grave, and water it with his tears; and perhaps he will put up a marble gravestone over me, unbeknownst to Jennie, and have an appropriate verse of Scripture carved on it, something like:

she openeth her mouth with wisdom;
and in her tongue is the law of kindness

I can see it as plain as if it was written. I hope they will make it come out even on the edges, and that he will think to have a white marble dove perched on the top, unless it costs too much.”

* * * * *

The years went on. Huldah surprised everybody by going away from home to get an education. She would have preferred marriage at that stage of her development, but to her mind there was no one worth marrying in Pleasant River save Pitt Packard, and, failing him, study would fill up the time as well as anything else.

The education forced a good many helpful ideas into pretty Huldah’s somewhat empty pate, though it by no means cured her of all her superstitions. She continued to keep a record of Saturday weather, and it proved as interesting and harmless a hobby as the collecting of china or postage-stamps.