soft noses. The boy's eyes were no
longer bloodshot nor ashamed.

"'Bout that other thing, sonnie, your girl?" Uncle Ambrose hesitated.
"Don't you tell me nothin' ef you ain't a mind to. Lord! don't I
remember how a young fellow hates bein' pried into."

"You ain't pryin'," the boy defended, "and it's comin' on great. I took
your advice. I just let myself do all the lovin' I could 'thout stewin'
over her feelin's fer me, and then all of a sudden she up and told me
she always had loved me, only she was afeard I didn't kire fer her."

Uncle Ambrose's face shone. "A'ire you worth her now, sonnie?"

"Lord, no," the boy answered; "but I kep' straight since that night and
I'll keep on. It's lovin' that done it."

Uncle Ambrose raised his rusty stovepipe hat. "Lovin', that's it," he
answered.

And then across his wrinkled face there marched a host of memories,
while keeping his eyes on the sky among whose soft clouds there might
easily have been floating any number of angels, he repeated the toast
made immortal by Kentuckians: "The ladies, God bless 'em!"

Suddenly hearing the noise of a horse's hoofs trotting away from the
neighbourhood of the farmhouse, Ambrose whirled, and before his
companion could guess what ailed him, started running back across the
lawn.

But this time Peachy was not to be so easily found. Uncle Ambrose
searched for her in the yard and in the garden, in the place where the
old summer house, now a ruin, had once stood, and then when the sun had
disappeared and only an afterglow remained, found her leaning over a
turnstile facing an orchard.

"I hope I ain't kept you waitin', Peachy," he remarked, a trifle
breathlessly.

The woman smiled and slipped her arm through his that they might both
lean together on the turnstile. "Most forty years, Ambrose," she
returned with a finer enjoyment than she could have felt in her youth.

And her sixty-year-old suitor blushed. "I know more'n I did then,
Peachy; I was frightened of your managin' ways." He was feeling a
considerable anxiety, for the woman beside him was like a piece of
fruit, no longer in her summer time, but reaching her perfection in late
autumn.

Very quietly then Peachy withdrew her arm.

"I'm managin' now, Ambrose," she confessed. "Seems like growin' old
don't lose us our faults; it kind er makes 'em set deeper. I should be
sorry to try you, but I'm some past fifty and ain't able to change."

[Illustration: "You kin manage me now a