your reformation was going to hold
out; but I won't let the grass grow under my feet now, till I tell her
just how things stand!"

"You're a good woman, Louisa; I don't see why I never noticed it
before."

"It's because I've been concealing my goodness too much. Stay here with
me tonight and don't go back to brood in that dismal, forsaken house.
We'll see how Jack is in the morning, and if he's all right, take him
along with you, so's to be all there together if Susanna comes back this
week, as I kind of hope she will. Make Ellen have the house all nice
and cheerful from top to bottom, with a good supper ready to put on the
table the night she comes. You'd better pick your asters and take 'em in
for the parlor, then I'll cut the chrysanthemums for you in the middle
of the week. The day she comes I'll happen in, and stay to dinner if
you find it's going to be mortifying for you; but if everything is as I
expect it will be, and the way Susanna always did have things, I'll
make for home and leave you to yourselves. Susanna ain't one to nag and
hector and triumph over a man when he's repented."

John hugged Louisa, pepper-and-salt shawl, black rigolette, and all,
when she finished this unprecedented speech; and when he went to sleep
that night in the old north chamber, the one he and Louisa had been
born in, the one his father and mother had died in, it was with a little
smile of hope on his lips.

Set her place at hearth and board
As it used to be!

These were the last words that crossed his waking thoughts.
Before Louisa went to her own bed, she wrote one of her brief and
characteristic epistles to Susanna, but it did not reach her, for the
"hills of home" had called John's wife so insistently on that Sunday,
that the next day found her on her way back to Farnham.

Dear Susanna [so the letter read], There's a new man in your house at
Farnham. His name is John Hathaway, but he's made all over and it was
high time. I say it's the hand of God! He won't own up that it is, but
I'm letting him alone, for I've done quarreling, though I don't like to
see a man get religion and deny it, for all the world like Peter in
the New Testament. If you have n't used up the last one of your
seventy-times-sevens, I think you'd better come back and forgive your
husband. If you don't, you'd better send for your son. I'm willing to
bear the burdens the Lord intends specially for me, but Jack belongs to
you, and a good-sized heavy