Miss Webster was standing on the veranda. Her brows were together in an
ugly scowl.

"Well!" she exclaimed. "So you go gallivanting about with boys in your
old age! Aren't you ashamed to make such an exhibition of yourself?"

Abby felt as if a hot palm had struck her face. Then a new spirit, born
of caressed vanity, asserted itself.

"Wouldn't you have done the same if you had been asked?" she demanded.

Miss Webster turned her back and went up to her room. She locked the
door and burst into tears. "I can't help it," she sobbed, helplessly.
"It's dreadful of me to hate Abby after all these years; but--those
terrible thirty! I'd give three of my millions to be where she is. I
used to think she was old, too. But she isn't. She's young! Young!--a
baby compared to me. I could more than be her mother. Oh, I must try as
a Christian woman to tear this feeling from my heart."

She wrote off a check and directed it to her pastor, then rang for the
trained nurse her physician had imported from New York, and ordered her
to steam and massage her face and rub her old body with spirits of wine
and unguents.

Strowbridge acquired the habit of dropping in on Miss Williams at all
hours. Sometimes he called at the dairy and sat on a corner of the table
while she superintended the butter-making. He liked her old-fashioned
music, and often persuaded her to play for him on the new grand piano in
the sky-blue parlor. He brought her many books by the latter-day
authors, all of them stories by men about men. He had a young contempt
for the literature of sentiment and sex. Even Miss Webster grew to like
him, partly because he ignored the possibility of her doing otherwise,
partly because his vital frank personality was irresistible. She even
invited him informally to dinner; and after a time he joked and guyed
her as if she were a school-girl, which pleased her mightily. Of Miss
Williams he was sincerely fond.

"You are so jolly companionable, don't you know," he would say to her.
"Most girls are bores; don't know enough to have anything to talk about,
and want to be flattered and flirted with all the time. But I feel as if
you were just another fellow, don't you know."

"Oh, I am used to the role of companion," she would reply.

With the first days of June he returned to Boston, and the sun turned
gray for one woman.

Life went its way in the old house. People became accustomed to the
spectacle of Miss Webster rejuvenated, and fo