p there to be
waited on. She is no more sick than the dog; but law, I couldn't make
Richard b'lieve it."

"Mother, you surely did not go to Richard with complaints of his wife,"
and James looked reproachfully across the table at his mother, who
replied: "I told him what I thought, for I wa'n't going to have him
miserable all the time thinking how sick she was, but I might as well
have talked to the wind, for any good it did. He even seemed
putcherky, too."

"I should be more than putcherky if you were to talk to me against my
wife if I had one," James retorted, thinking of Melinda and the way she
sang that solo in the choir the day before.

It was a little strange that James and John and Andy all took Ethelyn's
part against their mother, and even against Richard, who they thought
might have taken her with him.

"It would not have hurt her any more than fretting herself to death at
home. No, nor half so much; and she must feel like a cat in a strange
garret there alone with them."

It was John who said this--quiet John, who talked so little, and annoyed
Ethelyn so much by coming to the table in his blue frock, with his pants
tucked in his boots and his curly hair standing every way. Though very
much afraid of his grand sister-in-law, he admired her beyond
everything, and kept the slippers she brought him safely put away with a
lock of Daisy's hair and a letter written him by the young girl whose
grave was close beside Daisy's in the Olney cemetery. John had had his
romance and buried it with his heroine, since which time he had said but
little to womankind, though never was there a truer heart than that
which beat beneath the homespun frock Ethelyn so despised. Richard had
bidden him to be kind to Ethie, and John had said he would; and after
that promise was given had the farmhouse been on fire the sturdy fellow
would have periled life and limb to save her for Dick. To James, too,
Richard had spoken a word for Ethie, and to Andy also; so that there
were left to her four champions in his absence--for Eunice had had her
charge, with promises of a new dress if faithful to her trust; and thus
there was no one against poor Ethelyn saving the mother-in-law, who made
that first dinner after Richard's absence so uncomfortable that John
left the table without touching the boiled Indian pudding, of which he
was so fond, while James rather curtly asked what there was to be gained
by spitting out so about Ethelyn, and Andy lis