"I can't talk now, Loo; I'm tired out and half crazy. I must go to my
room and rest. After supper I'll tell you everything. Please don't keep
me now."

Supper that evening was a silent meal. The Elder did not speak once; the
two young people were absorbed in their own reflections, and Mrs.
Conklin's efforts to make talk were effectual only when she turned to
Jake. Mrs. Conklin, indeed, was seldom successful in anything she
attempted. She was a woman of fifty, or thereabouts, and her face still
showed traces of former good looks, but the light had long left her
round, dark eyes, and the colour her cheeks, and with years her figure
had grown painfully thin. She was one of the numerous class who delight
in taking strangers into their confidence. Unappreciated, as a rule, by
those who know them, they seek sympathy from polite indifference or
curiosity. Before he had been a day in the house Bancroft had heard from
Mrs. Conklin all about her early life. Her father had been a large
farmer in Amherst County, Massachusetts; her childhood had been
comfortable and happy: "We always kept one hired man right through the
winter, and in summer often had eight and ten; and, though you mightn't
think it now, I was the belle of all the parties." Dave (her husband)
had come to work for her father, and she had taken a likin' to him,
though he was such a "hard case." She told of Dave's gradual conversion
and of the Revivalist Minister, who was an Abolitionist as well, and had
proclaimed the duty of emigrating to Kansas to prevent it from becoming
a slave state. Dave, it appeared, had taken up the idea zealously, and
had persuaded her to go with him. Her story became pathetic in spite of
her self-pity as she related the hardships of that settlement in the
wilds, and described her loneliness, her shivering terror when her
husband was away hauling logs for their first home, and news came that