like Jerry Norton. Good as gold, your
mother says he is, good to his mother an' good to his sister, an' now
he's took his aunt home to live with 'em."

"I can't 'tend to callers when there's sickness in the house," Stella
plucked up spirit to say, and her mother returned wonderingly,--

"Why, it ain't sickness exactly, aunt Hill's ankle ain't. I wish I
could ha' got out there. I'd have asked him in."

Before the next Saturday aunt Hill's ankle had knit itself up and she
was gone. When Stella and her mother sat down to supper in their wonted
seclusion, Stella began her deferred task. She was inwardly excited over
it, and even a little breathless. It seemed incredible to her, still,
that Jerry and she had parted, and it would, she knew, seem so to her
mother when she should be told. She sat eating cup-cake delicately, but
with an ostentatious relish, to prove the robustness of her state.

"Mother," she began.

"Little more tea?" asked Mrs. Joyce, holding the teapot poised.

"No. I want to tell you somethin'."

"I guess I'll have me a drop more," said Mrs. Joyce. "Nobody need to
tell me it keeps me awake. I lay awake anyway."

Stella took another cup-cake in bravado.

"Mother," she said, "Jerry 'n' I've concluded to give it up."

"Give what up?" asked Mrs. Joyce, finding she had the brew too sweet and
pouring herself another drop.

"Oh, everything! We've changed our minds."

Mrs. Joyce set down her cup.

"You ain't broke off with Jerry Norton?"

"Yes. We broke it off together."

"You needn't tell me 'twas Jerry Norton's fault." Mrs. Joyce pushed her
cup from her and winked rapidly. "He's as good a boy as ever stepped,
an' he sets by you as he does his life."

Stella was regarding her in wonder, a gentle little creature who omitted
to say her soul was her own on ordinary days, yet rousing herself, with
ruffled feathers, to defend, not her young, but the alien outside the
nest.

"If he had give you the mitten, I shouldn't blame him a mite, turnin'
him away from the door as you have two Saturday nights runnin'. But he
ain't done it. I know Jerry too well for that. His word's as good 's his
bond, an' you'll go through the woods an' get a crooked stick at last."

Then she looked across at Stella, as if in amazement over her own fury;
but Stella, liking her for it and thrilled by its fervor, laughed out
because that was the way emotion took her.

"You can laugh," said her mother, nodding her head, as she r