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“Is Kelup Rivers comin’ over here to-night?” suddenly asked Aunt Melissa Adams, peering over her gold-bowed glasses, and fixing her small shrewd eyes sharply upon her niece.

Amanda did not look up from her fine hemming, but her thin hand trembled almost imperceptibly, and she gave a little start, as if such attacks were not altogether unexpected.

“I don’t know,” she answered, in a low tone.

“Dunno! why don’t ye know?” said her aunt, beginning to sway back and forth in the old-fashioned rocking-chair, but not once dropping her eyes from Amanda’s face. “Don’t he come every Saturday night?”

Amanda took another length, of thread, and this time her hand really shook.

“I guess so,” she answered.

“You guess so? Don’t ye know? An’ if he’s come every Saturday night for fifteen year, ain’t he comin’ to-night? I dunno what makes you act as if you wa’n’t sure whether your soul’s your own, ‘Mandy Green. My dander al’ays rises when I ask you a civil question an’ you put on that look.”

Amanda bent more closely over her sewing. She was a woman of thirty-five, with a pathetically slender figure, thin blond hair painstakingly crimped, and anxious blue eyes. Something deprecating lay in her expression; her days had been uncomplainingly sacrificed to the comfort of those she loved, and the desire of peace and good-will had crept into her face and stayed there. Her mother, who looked even slighter than she, and whose cheeks were puckered by wrinkles, sat by the window watching the two with a smile of empty content. Old Lady Green had lost her mind, said the neighbors; but she was sufficiently like her former self to be a source of unspeakable joy and comfort to Amanda, who nursed and petted her as if their positions were reversed, and protected her from the blunt criticism of the literal-tongued neighborhood with a reverential awe belonging to the old days when the fifth commandment was written and obeyed.

“Gold-bowed,” said Mrs. Green, with a look of unalloyed delight, pointing to her sister-in-law’s spectacles; and Aunt Melissa repeated indulgently,–

“Yes, yes, gold-bowed. I’ll let you take ’em a spell, arter I’ve set my heel. It’ll please her, poor creatur’!” she added, in an audible aside to Amanda. Since the time when Mrs. Green’s wits had ceased to work normally, she had treated her sympathetically, but from a lofty eminence. Aunt Melissa was perhaps too prosperous. She sat there, swaying back and forth, in her thin black silk trimmed with narrow rows of velvet, her heavy chin sunk upon a broad collar, worked in her youth, and she seemed to Mrs. Green a vision of majesty and delight, but to Amanda a virtuous censor, necessarily to be obeyed, yet whose presence made the summer day intolerable. Even her purple cap-ribbons bespoke terror to the evil-doer, and her heavy face was set, as a judgment, toward the doom of the man who knew not how to account for his actions. She began speaking again, and Amanda involuntarily gave a little start, as at a lightning flash.

“I says to myself when I drove off, this mornin’: ‘I’ll have a little talk with ‘Mandy. I don’ go there to spend a day more’n four times a year, an’ like as not she’ll be glad to have somebody to speak to, seen’ ‘s her mother’s how she is.'”

Amanda gave a quick look at Mrs. Green; but the old lady was busily pleating the hem of her apron and then smoothing it out again. Aunt Melissa rocked, and went on:–

“I says to myself: ‘Here they let Kelup carry on the farm at the halves, an’ go racin’ an’ trottin’ from the other place over here day in an’ day out. An’ when his Uncle Nat died, two year ago, then was the time for him to come over here an’ marry ‘Mandy an’ carry on the farm. But no, he’d rather hang round the old place, an’ sleep in the ell-chamber, an’ do their chores for his board, an’ keep on a-runnin’ over here.’ An’ when young Nat married, I says to myself, ‘That’ll make him speak.’ But it didn’t–an’ you ‘re a laughin’-stock, ‘Mandy Green, if ever there was one. Every time the neighbors see him steppin’ by Saturday nights, all fixed up, with that brown coat on he’s had sence the year one, they have suthin’ to say, ‘Goin’ over to ‘Mandy’s,’ that’s what they say. An’ on’y last Saturday one on ’em hollered out to me, when I was pickin’ a mess o’ pease for Sunday, ‘Wonder what ‘Mandy’ll answer when he gits round to askin’ of her?’ I hadn’t a word to say. ‘You better go to him,’ says I, at last.”