had said sharply to her daughter-in-law when Rose had told her of
the hasty trip she and her aunt had made to the largest town in
the county. "Folks'll think it's funny and kind o' silly. You
oughtn't to have encouraged it."

"Oh, Mother Mall, I didn't especially," the younger woman had
protested. "She just said in that quiet, settled way she has,
that she was going to--she thought it would be easier for her.
And I believe it will, too," she added, feeling how pathetic it
was that Aunt Rose had never looked half so well during Uncle
Martin's life as she had since his death.

"Oh, well," Mall commented, "Rose always was sort of sentimental,
but there's not many like her. She's right to take her time, too.
It'll be six or eight months, anyway, before she can get things
lined up. She's got a longer head than a body'd think for. Look
at the way she run that newspaper office when old Conroy died."

"That was nearly thirty years ago," commented his wife crisply,
"and Rose's got so used to being bossed around by Martin that
she'll find it ain't so easy to go ahead on her own."

With her usual shrewdness, Nellie had surmised the chief
difficulty, but it dwindled in real importance because of the
fact that Rose so frequently had the feeling that Martin merely
had gone on a journey and would come home some day, expecting an
exact accounting of her stewardship. His instructions were to her
living instructions which must be carried out to the letter.

She had attended with conscientious promptness to checking the