nsity; "the law settled that.
She was a cursed fraud anyway," he went on, with hurrying wrath; "she
ran away with--I thought she was dead--I'll swear by"--

"Thee needn't swear, Jerry," interrupted Enoch quietly; "if thy word is
good for nothing, thy blasphemy will not help it any."

The young man's face relaxed. There was a little silence.

"Has thee been up to thy house?" asked Enoch presently.

"Yes, yes," said Jerry lightly; "I dropped right in on the family
circle. The widow seems to be a nice, tidy little person, and the
kid--did you ever see anything to beat that kid, uncle?"

Enoch had been appealed to on this subject before.

"He's a very nice baby," he said gravely.

"They seem to be settled rather comfortably, and I guess I'll get a tent
and pitch it on some of these vacant lots, and not disturb them. The
little woman isn't really well enough to move, and besides, the kid
might kick if he had to give up the cradle; perfect fit, isn't it?"

* * * * *

"Enoch," said Rachel Embody to her husband, as they drove their
flea-bitten gray mare to the Friends' meeting on First Day, "what does
thee think of Jerry Sullivan and the widow Hart marrying as they did?
Doesn't thee think it was a little sudden for both of them?"

Enoch slapped the lines on the gray's callous back.

"I don't know, Rachel," he said; "there are some subjects which I do not
find profitable for reflection."

EM.

I.

Mrs. Wickersham helped her son from his bed to a chair on the porch, and
spread a patchwork quilt over his knees when he was seated.

"Don't you want something to put your feet on, Benny?" she asked
anxiously, with that hunger for servitude with which women persecute
their male sick.

The invalid looked down at his feet helplessly, and then turned his eyes
toward the stretch of barley-stubble below the vineyard. A stack of
baled hay in the middle of the field cast a dense black shadow in the
afternoon sun.

"No, I guess not," he said absently. "Has Lawson sent any word about the
hay?"

"He said he'd come and look at it in a day or two."

Mrs. Wickersham stood behind her son, smoothing the loose wrinkles from
his coat with her hard hand. He was scarcely more than a boy, and his
illness had given him that pathetic gauntness which comes from the
wasting away of youth and untried strength.

"I wanted a little money before the twenty-fourth," he said, feeling one
feverish hand