ticipation. To-day the trouble was there were no carrots in the soup,
and this omission reduced her to tears because it had blighted the hopes
of her entire morning.

"An' I'd been hankerin' arter them carrots ever since breakfast," she
whimpered.

"Don't cry, ma, I'll mash you up some nice ones for supper. That'll
be something to look forward to," said Sarah, who might have won
an immortal crown had such trophies been awarded to the patience of
daughters-in-law. "So you didn't buy that steer, Abel?"

"No, I didn't buy it."

"Have you seen Judy to-day?"

"I stopped there on my way home. She was making butter, and we talked
about buying an extra cow or two and letting Blossom and her send some
to market."

"Well it beats me!" observed Sarah, but whether her discomfiture was due
to Judy's butter or to Abel's love making, she did not explain. On the
whole the staidness of the courtship was pleasing to her. Her sense
of decorum was flattered by it, for she had as little tolerance of the
softer virtues as of the softer vines. It had been years since she
had felt so indulgent toward her second son; yet in spite of the
gratification his dejection afforded her, she was, as she had just
confessed, utterly and entirely "beat." His period of common sense--of
perfect and complete sobriety--had lasted for half a year, but she
was too shrewd a woman to be deceived by the mere external calmness of
appearances. She had had moreover, a long experience with males of
the Revercomb stock, and she knew that it was when their blood flowed
quietest that there was the greatest danger of an ultimate "rousing."
All her life she had lived in dread of this menace to respectability--to
that strict observance of the letter of the social law for which the
Hawtreys had stood for generations. On several occasions she had seen
a Revercomb really "roused," and when the transformation was once
achieved, not all the gravity of all the Hawtreys could withstand the
force of it. And this terrible potential energy in her husband's stock
would assert itself, she knew, after a period of tranquillity. She
hadn't been married to a Revercomb for nothing, she had once remarked.

If anything could have put her into a cheerful humour, it would have
been the depressed and solemn manner with which Abel went about the
preparations for his marriage. The inflexible logic of Calvinism had
passed into her fibre, until it had become almost an instinct with her
to tre