r.

"No leaving the Briars this season, Miss Lavinia," he said in a
laughing, choking voice as he bent across and extracted one of little
Miss Amandy's hands from the tight bunch she had curled herself into
under the edge of her pillow and bestowed a squeeze thereon. "It's all
fixed up over at Boliver this afternoon. There's worse than oil on the
place--and it's all yours now for keeps." With Rose Mary in his arms
Everett had entirely forgotten to announce to her such a minor fact as
the saving of her lands and estate, but to the two little old ladies
his sympathy had made him give the words of reprieve with his first
free breath. The bundles on the floor and the old trunk had smote his
heart with a fierce pain that the impulsive warmth of his greeting
and the telling of his rescue could only partly ease.

"The news only reached me day before--" he was going on to explain
when, candle in hand, Uncle Tucker appeared in the doorway. His
long-tailed night-shirt flapped around his bare, thin old legs, and
every separate gray lock stood by itself and rampant, while his eyes
seemed deeper and more mystic than ever.

"Well, what's all this ruckus?" he demanded as he peered at them
across the light of his candle. "Have any kind of cyclone blowed you
from New York clean across here to Harpeth Valley, boy?"

"He has come back with the mercy of our Lord in his hands to save our
home; and you go put on your pants before your pipes get chilled,
Tucker Alloway," answered Aunt Viney in her most militant tone of
voice. "And, Rose Mary, you can take that young man on out of here now
so Amandy can take that shame-faced head of hers out of that feather
pillow. It's all on account of that tored place in her night-cap I
told her to mend. You needn't neither of you come back no more,
because we must get to sleep, so as to be ready to unpack before
sun-up and get settled back for the day. And don't you go to bed,
neither one of you, without reading Jeremiah twelfth, first to last
verse, and me and Amandy will do the same." With which Everett found
himself dismissed with a seeming curtness which he could plainly see
was an heroic control of emotion in the feeble old stoic who was
trembling with exhaustion.

Uncle Tucker, called to account for the lack of warmth and also
propriety in his attire, had hastened back to his own apartment and
Everett found him sitting up in his bed, lighting the old cob with
trembling fingers but with his exci