o himself, he would not have harassed her. To him, also,
wedded to a hearth where he found warmth and peace, it would have been
sweet to live there always, though alone, and die by the light of its
dying fire. But Mary thought otherwise, and in matters of worldly
judgment he could only yield.

"I don't want you should make a mistake," said he. "Mebbe you an' I
don't look for'ard enough. They say you'll repent it if you stay, an'
there'll be a hurrah-boys all round. What say to makin' us a visit?
That'll kind o' stave it off, an' then we can see what's best to be
done."

Lucy Ann put her hands to her delicate throat, where her mother's gold
beads lay lightly, with a significant touch. She, like John, had an
innate gentleness of disposition. She distrusted her own power to judge.

"Maybe I might," said she faintly. "Oh, John, do you think I've got to?"

"It needn't be for long," answered John briefly, though he felt his eyes
moist with pity of her. "Mebbe you could stay a month?"

"Oh, I couldn't do that!" cried Lucy Ann, in wild denial. "I never could
in the world. If you'll make it a fortnight, an' harness up yourself,
an' bring me home, mebbe I might."

John gave his word, but when he took his leave of her, she leaned
forward into the dark, where the impatient horse was fretting, and made
her last condition.

"You'll let me turn the key on things here jest as they be? You won't
ask me to break up nuthin'?"

"Break up!" repeated John, with the intensity of an oath. "I guess you
needn't. If anybody puts that on you, you send 'em to me."

So Lucy Ann packed her mother's dresses into a little hair trunk that
had stood in the attic unused for many years, and went away to make her
visit. When she drove up to the house, sitting erect and slender in her
mother's cashmere shawl and black bonnet, Mary, watching from the
window, gave a little cry, as at the risen dead. John had told her
about Lucy Ann's transformation, but she put it all aside as a crazy
notion, not likely to last: now it seemed less a pathetic masquerade
than a strange bypath taken by nature itself.

The children regarded it with awe, and half the time called Lucy Ann
"grandma." That delighted her. Whenever they did it, she looked up to
say, with her happiest smile,--

"There! that's complete. You'll remember grandma, won't you? We mustn't
ever forget her."

Here, in this warm-hearted household, anxious to do her service in a way
that was not her