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Amanda had put down her sewing in her lap, and was looking steadfastly out of the window, with eyes brimmed by two angry tears. Once she wiped them with a furtive movement of the white garment in her lap; her cheeks were crimson. Aunt Melissa had lashed herself into a cumulative passion of words.

“An’ I says to myself, ‘If there ain’t nobody else to speak to ‘Mandy, I will,’ I says, when I was combin’ my hair this mornin’. ‘She ‘ain’t got no mother,’ I says, ‘nor as good as none, an’ if she ‘ain’t spunk enough to look out for herself, somebody’s got to look out for her.’ An’ then it all come over me–I’d speak to Kelup himself, an’ bein’ Saturday night, I knew I should ketch him here.”

“O Aunt Melissa!” gasped Amanda, “you wouldn’t do that!”

“Yes, I would, too!” asserted Aunt Melissa, setting her firm lips. “You see if I don’t, an’ afore another night goes over my head!”

But while Amanda was looking at her, paralyzed with the certainty that no mortal aid could save her from this dire extremity, there came an unexpected diversion. Old Lady Green spoke out clearly and decidedly from her corner, in so rational a voice that it seemed like one calling from the dead.

“‘Mandy, what be you cryin’ for? You come here an’ tell me what ’tis, an’ I’ll see to’t. You’ll spile your eyes, ‘Mandy, if you take on so.”

“There, there, ma’am! ’tain’t anything,” said Amanda, hurrying over to her chair and patting her on the shoulder. “We was just havin’ a little spat,–Aunt Melissa an’ me; but we’ve got all over it. Don’t you want to knit on your garter a little while now?”

But the old lady kept her glazed eyes fixed on Amanda’s face.

“Be you well to-day, ‘Mandy?” she said, wistfully. “If you ain’t well, you must take suthin’.”

“There, there! don’t you make a to-do, an’ she’ll come round all right,” said Aunt Melissa, moving her chair about so that it faced the old lady. “I’ll tell her suthin’ to take up her mind a little.” And she continued, in the loud voice which was her concession to Mrs. Green’s feebleness of intellect, “They’ve got a boarder over to the Blaisdells’.”

Mrs. Green sat up straight in her chair, smoothed her apron, and looked at her sister with grateful appreciation.

“Do tell!” she said, primly.

“Yes, they have. Name’s Chapman. They thought he was a book agent fust. But he’s buyin’ up old dishes an’ all matter o’ truck. He wanted my andirons, an’ I told him if I hadn’t got a son in a Boston store, he might ha’ come round me, but I know the vally o’ things now. You don’t want to sell them blue coverlids o’ yourn, do ye?”

Aunt Melissa sometimes asked the old lady questions from a sense of the requirements of conversation, and she was invariably startled when they elicited an answer.

“Them coverlids I wove myself, fifty-five years ago come next spring,” said Mrs. Green, firmly. “Sally Ann Mason an’ me used to set up till the clock struck twelve that year, spinnin’ an’ weavin’. Then we had a cup or two o’ green tea, an’ went to bed.”

“Well, you wove ’em, an’ you don’t want to sell ’em,” said Aunt Melissa, her eyes on her work. “If you do, ‘Lijah he’ll take ’em right up to Boston for you, an’ I warrant he’ll git you a new white spread for every one on ’em.”

“That was the year afore I was married,” continued Old Lady Green. “I had a set o’ white chiny with lavender sprigs, an’ my dress was changeable. He had a flowered weskit. ‘Mandy, you go into the clo’es-press in my bedroom an’ git out that weskit, an’ some o’ them quilts, an’ my M’s an’ O’s table-cloths.”

Amanda rose and hurried into the bedroom, in spite of Aunt Melissa’s whispered comment: “What makes you go to overhaulin’ things? She’ll forgit it in a minute.”