"Why," she began, "you see 'twas this way."

Mrs. Meade the elder, known as "old Mis' Meade," gave a majestic clearing of her throat. She brought her gaze indoors and bent a frowning glance on the two at the stove. A shade of vexation pa.s.sed over her face, grotesquely elongating the downward-dropping lines.

"Rita," she called, in what seemed warning, "you come here a minute.

Ain't I dropped a st.i.tch?"

Rita responded at once, bending over the stocking ostentatiously displayed.

"You let me take it to the light," she began; but old Mis' Meade laid thumb and finger on her ap.r.o.n, and having caught her daughter-in-law's eye, made mysterious grimaces at her. Amarita, the knitting in her hand, stared frankly back, and the old lady, forced to be explicit, bade her in a mumbling tone:--

"Wait till he's through his supper. It's no time now. There!" she continued, with a calculated clearness, "you give it back. I guess I didn't drop it, after all. Your fat's burnin'. Ketch it off, Elihu, won't ye?"

The imperiled fat made a diversion, and then supper was on the table, and old Mis' Meade moved away from the window and brought her great bulk over to partake of turnovers. There was a long silence while tea was pa.s.sed and the turnovers were p.r.o.nounced upon by the acquisition that is more eloquent than words. But after Elihu had finished his fifth and last, he pushed his cup away with solemn satisfaction and asked his wife across the table:--

"What's that packin'-case out in the front entry?"

Old Mis' Meade gave a smothered e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n of discouragement, but Amarita looked up with the brightest eyes.

She was having a moment of perfect domestic peace, when all she did seemed to bear fruitage in the satisfaction of hunger and kindred needs, and it innocently seemed to her as if her compensating pleasure was about to come. She gazed straight at her husband, her eyes darkening with the pleasure in them.

"Why," said she, "that's the 'Master Minds of History.'"

Elihu bent a frowning brow upon her.

"The 'Master Minds of History,'" she repeated. "The agent was here this afternoon--"

"You don't think the mice'll git at them pies up in the blue chist, do ye?" inquired old Mis' Meade, fatuous in a desperate seeking to direct the talk.

Amarita gave her a pa.s.sing glance of wonder.

"Why, no," she said. "They couldn't get in to save their little souls.

You see"--she turned again to Elihu--"the agent was here this afternoon--"

Old Mis' Meade almost groaned, and went away to her bedroom, as if she could not endure the hearing of the coming contest or to see the slain.

"What agent?" asked Elihu.

He had gone back to his seat by the fire, and Amarita, answering, stood with her hand upon the devastated table.

"Why, the book agent. He come in a buggy, and he had this set with him."

"Set o' what?"

"Why, set o' books. He's takin' orders for 'em, and this was a set he brought along under the seat, thinkin' somebody, the minister or somebody that knew what's what, would buy it right out. There's twelve volumes, and they're a dollar and eighty-seven a volume, and there's ill.u.s.trations, and it's all printed in the clearest type."

She paused, flushed and expectant, and Elihu stared at her.

"A dollar and eighty-seven cents!" he repeated. "You ain't gone and put your name down for twelve books, a dollar and eighty-seven cents apiece?"

"Why, no," said Amarita. "Course I ain't. I didn't have the money, and so I told him. I would, in a minute, if I'd had it."

"Well, what's the packin'-case here for?" inquired Elihu slowly, while his mind labored.

"Why, he was possessed to leave it. 'You look over the volumes,' he says, 'and read 'em all you want to, and if you don't feel to subscribe then, it sha'n't cost you a cent.' And he's comin' along here pretty soon, and he's goin' to call, and if we don't conclude to keep 'em, he'll take 'em right back."

"My king!" said Elihu. He looked at her in complete discouragement, and Amarita returned his gaze with one bespeaking a conviction of her own innocence. "Don't ye know no better'n that? Take 'em away! All the takin' away he'll do'll be in a hog's eye. He'll say you bought 'em, and ain't paid for 'em, and 'long about the first o' the month he'll send in a bill for twelve books at a dollar and eighty-seven cents apiece."

Amarita made a picture of childlike misery. Her eyes had the piteous look of coming tears, and she swallowed once or twice before speech was possible.

"O Elihu," she breathed, "you don't really s'pose that, do you?"

"Course he will," said Elihu. "That's the way they do--come drivin'

along a time o' day when there's no menfolks to home, and take in the womenfolks. They know women ain't got no business trainin'. How do they know it? Because they've tried it over 'n' over, and every time they've come out ahead."

The tears were dropping now, and Amarita walked hastily away to conceal them, and got down her dish-pan, although the table was not yet cleared.

By the time she had turned from the sink again, a shadow of her hopefulness came wanly back.

"I don't believe he's that kind of a fellow," she faltered. "He talked real fair. I thought I should admire to look 'em over. I thought maybe we could read some out loud in the evenin', while your mother knit."

"'Talk fair!' Course he talked fair," said Elihu. "That's a part on 't.

I'll bet a dollar if you's in a court o' law you couldn't remember what he said."

"I could the sense of it."

"That's it! Why, don't ye know, when anything's business, it's got to be jest so and no other way? 'Tain't surprisin' you shouldn't. Womenfolks ain't called on to do brain work, any to speak of--well, keep school they may, and a matter o' that--but when it comes to business--d'ye have any witnesses?"

"No," said Amarita, in a small voice.

"Well, you've done about as bad for yourself as ye could, fur 's I can see. Now, you hearken to me. You leave that packin'-case where he set it, and don't you move it so much as a hair to the right or the left, and don't you lift the cover. And if that feller ever darkens these doors, you come and call me."

Then Elihu rose and took a candle and went off to his desk in the sitting-room, and Amarita cleared the table with swift, sweeping motions, as if she longed to hurl the dishes from her. Old Mis' Meade came heavily back from her bedroom.

"Well," said she, in the scorn sprung from experience, "I never seen sich actions. Terrible time, an' n.o.body to it! What made ye tell him?"

Amarita returned no answer. She was washing dishes now, with no noise, setting down each article softly, yet with the same air of longing to destroy.

"Witnesses!" old Mis' Meade grumbled, settling to her work by the window. "If Elihu's the size he used to be, I'd show him how much womenfolks knew about business. If you want one o' them books to read to-night, you step into the front entry an' pick ye out one. I'll stand by ye."

Still Amarita made no answer. She was not thinking of the books. Swift as wood-creatures coursing on the track of prey, her mind was racing over the field of her life with Elihu and pinning down the mistakes he had made. She had never seemed to see them, but not one of them had escaped her. There was the day when a traveling salesman had sold him the onion seed that never came up, and the other one when he had bought Old White of the peddler, and seen him go lame after a two-mile drive, and when he dated a note on Sunday and the school-teacher had laughed.

At first Amarita had not merely ignored his errors. She had, indeed, shut her eyes upon them and turned quickly away; but as it became apparent that Elihu was keeping a record of her impulsive, random deeds and drawing data from them, so she began to see the list of his, and turned to it now and then, when he found her foolish, to read it over in a pa.s.sionate self-comparison.

When the dishes were done she sat down to her sewing, outwardly calm, but conscious of that hot flush in her cheeks and of her quickly beating heart. Old Mis' Meade muttered a little as she knit, and cast her son a hostile glance from time to time. But Elihu was happily impervious to criticism. He spread a sheet of paper on the table, and sat down to it with the air of a schoolboy who is about to square his elbows and perhaps put out a rhythmic tongue.

"Where's my two-foot rule?" he inquired of Amarita.

"In your t'other trousers," she answered, sewing swiftly, without looking up.

Elihu glanced at her in a mild surprise, and his mother chuckled. She was devoted to her son, and more or less overshadowed by his prerogative as "menfolks" born to absorb the cream of things; but the elderly good sense in her was alive to the certainty that if Amarita had not been so yielding, Elihu would never have been so b.u.mptious.