young person, and it has been impossible entirely to fulfil his
intentions with regard to her. Ah, he wasn't wise always, poor Jonathan,
but I never doubted that he meant well at bottom, however things
may have appeared. His anxiety in the case of your mother was very
beautiful, and if his plans seem to have miscarried, we must lay the
blame after all, on the quality of his judgment, not of his heart."

"And the girl will be twenty-one next April, I am told?"

"Her birthday is the seventeenth, exactly ten years from the date of
Jonathan's death."



CHAPTER VIII


SHOWS TWO SIDES OF A QUARREL


At dusk that evening the miller, who had spent the day in Applegate,
stopped at Bottom's Ordinary on his way home, and received a garbled
account of the quarrel from the farmers gathered about the hospitable
hearth in the public room. The genius of personality had enabled Betsey
Bottom to hold open doors to the traveller long after the wayside tavern
in Virginia had passed from the road and the one certain fact relating
to the chance comer was that he never came. By combining a store with a
public house, she managed still to defy the progress of time as well as
the absence of guests. "Thank the Lord, I've never been one to give in
to changes!" it was her habit to exclaim.