g.

While she felt the warmth of indoor comfort wafting about her, Amarita
cast up a hesitating yet altogether happy look at her husband. She knew
from old habit that she must choose her time of approach, but the warmth
and the plenitude of supper and her own inner enchantment with what she
had to tell convinced her against reason that the time was now.

"Why," she began, "you see 'twas this way."

Mrs. Meade the elder, known as "old Mis' Meade," gave a majestic
clearing of her throat. She brought her gaze indoors and bent a frowning
glance on the two at the stove. A shade of vexation passed over her
face, grotesquely elongating the downward-dropping lines.

"Rita," she called, in what seemed warning, "you come here a minute.
Ain't I dropped a stitch?"

Rita responded at once, bending over the stocking ostentatiously
displayed.

"You let me take it to the light," she began; but old Mis' Meade laid
thumb and finger on her apron, and having caught her daughter-in-law's
eye, made mysterious grimaces at her. Amarita, the knitting in her hand,
stared frankly back, and the old lady, forced to be explicit, bade her
in a mumbling tone:--

"Wait till he's through his supper. It's no time now. There!" she
continued, with a calculated clearness, "you give it back. I guess I
didn't drop it, after all. Your fat's burnin'. Ketch it off, Elihu,
won't ye?"

The imperiled fat made a diversion, and then supper was on the table,
and old Mis' Meade moved away from the window and brought her great bulk
over to partake of turnovers. There was a long silence while tea was
passed and the turnovers were pronounced upon by the acquisition that is
more eloquent than words. But after Elihu had finished his fifth and
last, he pushed his cup away with solemn satisfaction and asked his wife
across the table:--

"What's that packin'-case out in the front entry?"

Old Mis' Meade gave a smothered ejaculation of discouragement, but
Amarita looked up with the brightest eyes.

She was having a moment of perfect domestic peace, when all she did
seemed to bear fruitage in the satisfaction of hunger and kindred needs,
and it innocently seemed to her as if her compensating pleasure was
about to come. She gazed straight at her husband, her eyes darkening
with the pleasure in them.

"Why," said she, "that's the 'Master Minds of History.'"

Elihu bent a frowning brow upon her.

"The 'Master Minds of History,'" she repeated. "The agent was here t