the boys had been put to bed in the
warmed room, and she knew they were sleeping the sound sleep of deep
fatigue, she went to her own room to sit down and think it all over.
There Maria found her, wiping away her tears, and took her in her arms,
and kissed her.

"It's right. It's all right. It's God's ways," said the mother.

"A son's a son till he gets a wife;
But a daughter's a daughter all her life."

CHAPTER VII. WEEKS OF CONVALESCENCE

PLENTY OF NURSING FROM LOVING, TENDER HANDS.

WHAT days those were that followed the arrival of the boys home. In
Shorty's hard, rough life he had never so much as dreamed of such
immaculate housekeeping as Mrs. Klegg's. He had hardly been in speaking
distance of such women as Si's mother and sisters. To see these bright,
blithe, sweet-speeched women moving about the well-ordered house in busy
performance of their duties was a boundless revelation to him. It opened
up a world of which he had as little conception as of a fairy realm. For
the first time he began to understand things that Si had told him of his
home, yet it meant a hundredfold more to him than to Si, for Si had been
brought up in that home. Shorty began to regard the Deacon and Si as
superior beings, and to stand in such awe of Mrs. Klegg and the girls
that he became as tongue-tied as a bashful school-boy in their presence.
It amazed him to hear Si, when the girls would teaze him, speak to them
as sharply as brothers sometimes will, and just as if they were ordinary
mortals.

"Si, you orter to be more careful in talkin' to your sisters," he
remonstrated when they were alone.

"You've bin among rough men so long that you don't know how to talk to
real ladies."

"O, come off," said Si, petulantly. "What's a-eatin you. You don't know
them girls as well as I do. Particularly Maria. She'll run right over
you if you let her. She's one o' the best girls that ever breathed, but
you've got to keep a tight rein on her. The feller that marries her's
got to keep the whip-hand or she'll make him wish that he'd never bin
born."

Shorty's heart bounded at the thought of any man having the unspeakable
happiness of marrying that peerless creature, and then having the
meanness not to let her do precisely as she wanted to.

Both the boys had been long enough in the field to make that plain farm
home seem a luxurious palace of rest. The beds were wonders of
softness and warmth, from which no unwelcome reveille o