ut your Uncle Zeke's. But it's so lonesome out there
I haven't the heart to send her. Besides, she wouldn't know what
to make of it."

"What'd father say?"

"That's another thing." Mrs. Warham had latterly grown
jealous--not without reason--of her husband's partiality for Susan.

Ruth sighed. "Oh, dear!" cried she. "I don't know what to do.
How's she ever going to get married!"

"If she'd only been a boy!" said Mrs. Warham, on her knees,
taking the unevenness out of the front of the skirt. "A girl has
to suffer for her mother's sins."

Ruth made no reply. She smiled to herself--the comment of the
younger generation upon the older. Sin it might have been; but,
worse than that, it was a stupidity--to let a man make a fool of
her. Lorella must have been a poor weak-minded creature.

By dinner time Ruth had completely soothed and smoothed her
vanity. Sam had been caught by Susan simply because he had seen
Susan before he saw her.

All that would be necessary was a good chance at him, and he
would never look at Susan again. He had been in the East, where
the admired type was her own--refined, ladylike, the woman of
the dainty appearance and manners and tastes. A brief
undisturbed exposure to her charms and Susan would seem coarse
and countrified to him. There was no denying that Susan had
style, but it was fully effective only when applied to a sunny
fairy-like beauty such as hers.

But at midday, when Susan came in with Warham, Ruth's jealousy
opened all her inward-bleeding wounds again. Susan's merry eyes,
her laughing mouth, her funny way of saying even commonplace
things--how could quiet, unobtrusive, ladylike charms such as
Ruth's have a chance if Susan were about? She waited, silent and
anxious, while her mother was having the talk with her father in the
sitting-room. Warham, mere man, was amused by his wife's scheming.

"Don't put yourself out, Fanny," said he. "If the boy wants Ruth
and she wants him, why, well and good. But you'll only make a
mess interfering. Let the young people alone."

"I'm surprised, George Warham," cried Fanny, "that you can show
so little sense and heart."

"To hear you talk, I'd think marriage was a business, like groceries."

Mrs. Warham thought it was, in a sense. But she would never have
dared say so aloud, even to her husband--or, rather, especially
to her husband. In matters of men and women he was thoroughly
innocent, with the simplicity of the old-