the candle-light. The young minister tiptoed
in the back door and across the kitchen to the back stairs. The
sitting-room door was open, and the candle-light streamed out, and
the treble voices rose high. Thomas, advancing through the dusky
kitchen with cautious steps, encountered suddenly a chair in the dark
corner by the stairs, and just saved himself from falling. There was
a startled outcry from the sitting-room, and his mother came running
into the kitchen with a candle.

"Who is it?" she demanded, valiantly. Then she started and gasped as
her son confronted her. He shook a furious warning fist at the
sitting-room door and his mother, and edged towards the stairs. She
followed him close. "Hadn't you better jest step in a minute?" she
whispered. "Them girls have been here an hour, and I know they're
waitin' to see you." Thomas shook his head fiercely, and swung
himself around the corner into the dark crook of the back stairs. His
mother thrust the candle into his hand. "Take this, or you'll break
your neck on them stairs," she whispered.

Thomas, stealing up the stairs like a cat, heard one of the girls
call to his mother--"Is it robbers, Mis' Merriam? Want us to come an'
help tackle 'em?"--and he fairly shuddered; for Evelina's gentle-lady
speech was still in his ears, and this rude girlish call seemed to
jar upon his sensibilities.

"The idea of any girl screeching out like that," he muttered. And if
he had carried speech as far as his thought, he would have added,
"when Evelina is a girl!"

He was so angry that he did not laugh when he heard his mother answer
back, in those conclusive tones of hers that were wont to silence all
argument: "It ain't anything. Don't be scared. I'm coming right
back." Mrs. Merriam scorned subterfuges. She took always a silent
stand in a difficulty, and let people infer what they would. When
Mary Ann Pease inquired if it was the cat that had made the noise,
she asked if her mother had finished her blue and white counterpane.

The two girls waited a half-hour longer, then they went home. "What
do you s'pose made that noise out in the kitchen?" asked Arabella
Mann of Mary Ann Pease, the minute they were out-of-doors.

"I don't know," replied Mary Ann Pease. She was a broad-backed young
girl, and looked like a matron as she hurried along in the dusk.

"Well, I know what I think it was," said Arabella Mann, moving ahead
with sharp jerks of her little dark body.

"What?"

"I