y: but Samantha Ann Ripley was a spinster
purely by accident. She had seldom been exposed to the witcheries of
children, or she would have known long before this that, so far as she
was personally concerned, they would always prove irresistible. She
marched into the kitchen like a general resolved upon the extinction of
the enemy. She walked out again, half an hour later, with the very teeth
of her resolve drawn, but so painlessly that she had not been aware of
the operation! She marched in a woman of a single purpose; she came out
a double-faced diplomatist, with the seeds of sedition and conspiracy
lurking, all unsuspected, in her heart.

The cause? Nothing more than a dozen trifles as "light as air." Timothy
had sat upon a little wooden stool at her feet; and, resting his arms on
her knees, had looked up into her kind, rosy face with a pair of liquid
eyes like gray-blue lakes, eyes which seemed and were the very windows
of his soul. He had sat there telling his wee bit of a story; just a
vague, shadowy, plaintive, uncomplaining scrap of a story, without
beginning, plot, or ending, but every word in it set Samantha Ann
Ripley's heart throbbing.

And Gay, who knew a good thing when she saw it, had climbed up into her
capacious lap, and, not being denied, had cuddled her head into that
"gracious hollow" in Samantha's shoulder, that had somehow missed the
pressure of the childish heads that should have lain there. Then
Samantha's arm had finally crept round the wheedlesome bit of soft
humanity, and before she knew it her chair was swaying gently to and
fro, to and fro, to and fro; and the wooden rockers creaked more sweetly
than ever they had creaked before, for they were singing their first
cradle song!

Then Gay heaved a great sigh of unspeakable satisfaction, and closed her
lovely eyes. She had been born with a desire to be cuddled, and had had
precious little experience of it. At the sound of this happy sigh and
the sight of the child's flower face, with the upward curling lashes on
the pink cheeks and the moist tendrils of hair on the white forehead,
and the helpless, clinging touch of the baby arm about her neck, I
cannot tell you the why or wherefore, but old memories and new desires
began to stir in Samantha Ann Ripley's heart. In short, she had met the
enemy, and she was theirs!

Presently Gay was laid upon the old-fashioned settle, and Samantha
stationed herself where she could keep the flies off her by wav