"Nancy Ellen had just been showing me his picture and telling me
about him. Great Day, but she's in love with him!"

"And so he is with her, if Lang's conclusions from his behaviour
can be depended upon. They inform me that he can be induced to
converse on no other subject. The whole arrangement appeals to me
as distinctly admirable."

"And you should see the lilac bush and the cabbage roses," said
Kate. "And the strangest thing is Father. He is peaceable as a
lamb. She is not to teach, but to spend the winter sewing on her
clothes and bedding, and Father told her he would give her the
necessary money. She said so. And I suspect he will. He always
favoured her because she was so pretty, and she can come closer to
wheedling him than any of the rest of us excepting you, Agatha."

"It is an innovation, surely!"

"Mother is nearly as bad. Father furnishing money for clothes and
painting the barn is no more remarkable than Mother letting her
turn the house inside out. If it had been I, Father would have
told me to teach my school this winter, buy my own clothes and
linen with the money I had earned, and do my sewing next summer.
But I am not jealous. It is because she is handsome, and the man
fine-looking and with such good prospects."

"There you have it!" said Adam emphatically. "If it were you,
marrying Jim Lang, to live on Lang's west forty, you WOULD pay
your own way. But if it were you marrying a fine-looking young
doctor, who will soon be a power in Hartley, no doubt, it would