"Yes, yes, gold-bowed. I'll let you take 'em a spell, arter I've set my
heel. It'll please her, poor creatur'!" she added, in an audible aside
to Amanda. Since the time when Mrs. Green's wits had ceased to work
normally, she had treated her sympathetically, but from a lofty
eminence. Aunt Melissa was perhaps too prosperous. She sat there,
swaying back and forth, in her thin black silk trimmed with narrow rows
of velvet, her heavy chin sunk upon a broad collar, worked in her
youth, and she seemed to Mrs. Green a vision of majesty and delight,
but to Amanda a virtuous censor, necessarily to be obeyed, yet whose
presence made the summer day intolerable. Even her purple cap-ribbons
bespoke terror to the evil-doer, and her heavy face was set, as a
judgment, toward the doom of the man who knew not how to account for
his actions. She began speaking again, and Amanda involuntarily gave a
little start, as at a lightning flash.

"I says to myself when I drove off, this mornin': 'I'll have a little
talk with 'Mandy. I don' go there to spend a day more'n four times a
year, an' like as not she'll be glad to have somebody to speak to,
seen' 's her mother's how she is.'"

Amanda gave a quick look at Mrs. Green; but the old lady was busily
pleating the hem of her apron and then smoothing it out again. Aunt
Melissa rocked, and went on:--

"I says to myself: 'Here they let Kelup carry on the farm at the
halves, an' go racin' an' trottin' from the other place over here day
in an' day out. An' when his Uncle Nat died, two year ago, then was the
time for him to come over here an' marry 'Mandy an' carry on the farm.
But no, he'd rather hang round the old place, an' sleep in the
ell-chamber, an' do their chores for his board, an' keep on a-runnin'