ere, Miss
Custer: you'll spoil your clothes."

"Impossible," said Miss Custer, glancing around at the cleanness of
everything with flattering significance, and seated herself in a low
splint-bottomed chair.

"To be sure, Peggy scrubbed this morning," said Aunt Ruby with a feeling
of satisfaction, "but one can't ever be very sure about a
kitchen-floor."

"I could always be sure enough of yours to scatter my best things upon
it," said Miss Custer, who, wishing to be entertained, was exceedingly
good-natured; though, for that matter, she was seldom otherwise.

Aunt Ruby, who was greatly taken with the fine-lady boarder who made
herself so common, entertained her better than she thought, for Miss
Custer took a curious interest in most of the people she met, and liked
to study them.

Of course Aunt Ruby could not spend time for her own or anybody else's
amusement merely: when she got through with the raspberries she went at
something else, her loose slippers clattering over the floor back and
forth wherever her duty called her. But still, she talked, and Miss
Custer sat looking out into the clean-swept back yard with its boxed-up
flower-beds blooming with the gayest annuals, and its cooped-up hens
with their broods of puffy chickens scratching and picking and chirping
outside.

"Have Doctor Ebling and Miss Stanley been long engaged?" Miss Custer
asked, the conversation having somehow led up to that query.

"Oh, la! yes," Aunt Ruby answered--"for more'n a year. The way of it
was: Ruth's guardian, Mr. Murray, who was a minister, went off to some
forrin country several years ago to be a missionary, and left Ruth here
to finish her education. He was to send for her to come an' teach in a
mission-school if she wanted to go--an' she al'ays said she did--after
she'd graduated in the normal. But she came up here to stay a spell
after graduatin', an' met Doctor Ebling; an' they took a notice to each
other right away, an' were engaged. She wrote to Mr. Murray about it,
an' he gave his consent to the marriage. But it couldn't take place just
yet, for the doctor had only just begun his practice an' wasn't ready to
settle down."

"That is, I suppose, he had not sufficient means to set up
housekeeping?" said Miss Custer, smiling.

"Well, perhaps not in the way he'd like," Aunt Ruby returned evasively,
not being a gossip in the mischievous sense.

"And your other gentleman-boarder, Mr. Bruce--" began Miss Custer, and
then sto