wife; and they said that Mary was just as usual and Bob as busy as a bee.

However, my sister spoke of it off and on, and when I asked her if the man
persecuted her, and if she wanted my help to thrust him out once for all,
she answered thus:

"You can't call it persecution," she told me, "but often he says of a
night, speaking in general like, that an Englishman never knows when he's
beat, and things like that; and when he went to Plymouth, he spent a month
of his money and bought me a ring, with a proper precious blue stone in it
for my sixty-sixth birthday. And nothing will do but I wear it on my
rheumatic finger. In fact you can't be even with the man, and I feel like
a bird afore a snake."

All the same she wouldn't let me speak a word to him. She wept a bit, and
then she began to laugh and, in fact, went on about it like a giglet wench
of twenty-five. But my firm impression continued to be that she was
suffering and growing feared of Battle, and would soon be in the doctor's
hands for her nerves, if something weren't done.

I troubled a good bit and tried to get a definite view out of her, but I
failed. Then I had a go at Bob too; but for the first time since I had
known him, he was a bit short and sharp like, and what I had to say didn't
interest him in the least. In fact he told me in so many words to mind my
own business and leave him to mind his.

Then another busy spring kept us apart a good bit, till one evening Noah
Sweet came up, all on his own, with a bit of startling news.

"I wasn't listening," he said, "and I should feel a good bit put out if