Granger twins.

"They are so interesting," she said to Monroe, a day or two later.

"Wal, I guess they be," answered Monroe, amiably. The quality of being
interesting did not assume to his vision the proportions it presented to
Cynthia Gardner's, but he saw no reason to deny its existence. Cynthia
cast a backward glance from the wagon as she spoke, and saw Reuben
slowly and stiffly gathering up dry stalks in his garden, while Stephen
propped up the declining side of a water-butt in his adjoining domain,
one man's back carefully turned to the other.

She walked back from the Centre, and stopped to talk with the twins in a
casual manner. But no careful inadvertence drew them, at this or any
later time when their social relations had become firmly established,
into a triangular conversation. They greeted her with cordiality,
responded to her advances, talked to her with the tolerant and humorous
shrewdness that lurked in their dim eyes, but it was always one at a
time. If, with disarming naivete, she appealed to Stephen, Reuben turned
into a graven image; and if she chaffed with Reuben, Stephen became as
one who having eyes seeth not, and having ears heareth not. But she
persisted with a zeal which, if not according to knowledge, was the
result of a firm belief in the possibility of a final adjustment of
differences. She did not know, herself, what led her into such
earnestness,--a caprice, or the lingering pathos of two lonely, barren
lives.

Monroe watched her proceedings with tolerant kindliness. It was not his
business to discourage her. He knew what it was to be discouraged, and
he felt that there was quite enough discouragement going about in life
without his adding to it.

"I tell you they would like to be reconciled, Mr. Monroe," said Cynthia.
"They don't know they would like it, but they would."

"Wal, mebbe they would. They're gittin' to be old men. And when you git
along as far as that, you don't, perhaps, worry so much about _bein'_
reconciled, but neither does it seem as worth while _not_ to. There's a
good deal that's sort of instructive about gittin' old," he ruminated.

"It's very lonely for them both, I think;" and Cynthia's voice fell into
the ready accents of youthful pity.

"Their quarrel's been kinder comp'ny for 'em," suggested Monroe.

"It's overstayed its time," asserted Cynthia.

"Mebbe," answered Monroe.

The crisis--for Cynthia had been looking for a crisis--came, after all,
unexpec