pour firewater. Will you be one of them?"

"Well," Jane hesitated, "I'm not so very young, you know; nor so very
beautiful, either."

"You are to me," responded Mrs. Bates, with a caloric brevity.

"Nobody shall come," she went on, "who wasn't here before the War. Those
who came before the Incorporation--that was in '37, wasn't it?--shall be
doubly welcome. And if I can find any one who passed through the Massacre
(as an infant, you understand), he shall have the head place. I mean to
ask your father--and your mother," she added, with a firm but delicate
emphasis. "I must call on her presently."

She fixed her eyes on the fireplace. "I suppose I was silly--the way I
acted when your father married," she went on, carefully. "We were only
friends; there was really nothing between us; but I was piqued and--oh,
well, you know how it is."

"I!" cried Jane, routed by her alarm from her contrite and tearful mood.
"I? Not the least bit, I assure you!" She blushed and gulped and ducked
her head and half hid her face behind her hand. "Not the least in the
world. Why, if I were to die to-morrow nobody would care but pa and ma
and Roger and Truesdale and Alice; well--and Rosy; yes, perhaps Rosy
would care for me--if I was dead. But nobody else; oh, dear, no!" She
stared at Mrs. Bates with a hard, wide brightness.

Mrs. Bates considerately shifted her gaze to the front of the bureau. She
ran her eye down one row of knobs: "I wonder who he is?" And up the
other: "I hope he is worthy of her."