us if we had not taken you in
that day to break up our home with your mischief."

Anna was cut to the quick. "Oh, Mrs. Bartlett, please do not say that;
I will go away as soon as you like, but it is not with my consent that
David has these foolish fancies about me."

"And do you mean to say that you have never encouraged him,"
indignantly demanded the irate mother, who with true feminine
inconsistency would not have her boy's affections go begging, even
while she scorned the object of it.

"Encouraged him? I have begged, entreated him to let me alone; I do
not want his love."

An angry sparrow defending her brood could not have been more
indignantly demonstrative than this gentle old lady.

"And isn't he good enough for you, Miss?" she asked in a voice that
shook with wrath.

"Dear Mrs. Bartlett, would you have me take his love and return it?"

"No, no; that would never do!" and the inconsistent old soul rocked
herself to and fro in an agony of despair.

Anna did not resent Mrs. Bartlett's indignation, unjust though it was;
she knew how blind good mothers could be when the happiness of their
children is at stake. She felt only pity for her and remembered only
her kindness. So slipping down on her knees beside the old lady's
chair, she took the toil-worn old hands in her own and said:

"Do not think hardly of me, Mrs. Bartlett. You have been so good--and
when I am gone, I want you to think of me with affection. I will go
away, and all this trouble will straighten itself out, and you will
forget that I ever caused you a moment's pain."

Dave came in with the bucket of water that had caused the little squall
and prevented his mother from replying, but the hard lines had relaxed
in the good old face. She was again "mother" whom they all knew and
loved. Sanderson followed close after David; he had just come from
Boston, he said, and inquired for Kate with a simple directness that
left no doubt as to whom he had come to see.

It is an indisputable law of the eternal feminine for all women to
flaunt a conquest in the face of the man who had declined their
affection. Kate was not in love with her cousin David, but she was
devoutly thankful to Providence that there was a Lennox Sanderson to
flaunt before him in the capacity of tame cat, and prove that he "was
not the only man in the world," as she put it to herself.

Therefore when Lennox Sanderson handed her a magnificent bunch of
Jacqueminot roses that