t thinking of the books. Swift
as wood-creatures coursing on the track of prey, her mind was racing
over the field of her life with Elihu and pinning down the mistakes he
had made. She had never seemed to see them, but not one of them had
escaped her. There was the day when a traveling salesman had sold him
the onion seed that never came up, and the other one when he had bought
Old White of the peddler, and seen him go lame after a two-mile drive,
and when he dated a note on Sunday and the school-teacher had laughed.
At first Amarita had not merely ignored his errors. She had, indeed,
shut her eyes upon them and turned quickly away; but as it became
apparent that Elihu was keeping a record of her impulsive, random deeds
and drawing data from them, so she began to see the list of his, and
turned to it now and then, when he found her foolish, to read it over in
a passionate self-comparison.

When the dishes were done she sat down to her sewing, outwardly calm,
but conscious of that hot flush in her cheeks and of her quickly beating
heart. Old Mis' Meade muttered a little as she knit, and cast her son a
hostile glance from time to time. But Elihu was happily impervious to
criticism. He spread a sheet of paper on the table, and sat down to it
with the air of a schoolboy who is about to square his elbows and
perhaps put out a rhythmic tongue.

"Where's my two-foot rule?" he inquired of Amarita.

"In your t'other trousers," she answered, sewing swiftly, without
looking up.

Elihu glanced at her in a mild surprise, and his mother chuckled. She
was devoted to her son, and more or less overshadowed by his prerogative
as "menfolks" born to absorb the cream of things; but the elderly good
sense in her was alive to the certainty that if Amarita had not been so
yielding, Elihu would never have been so bumptious.

After he had risen and gone off rather helplessly to seek his t'other
trousers, Amarita did glance after him with a tentative movement from
her chair. It almost seemed as if she repented and meant to go on the
quest herself. Old Mis' Meade, translating this, held her breath and
waited; but Amarita only sighed and took a needleful of thread. Then
Elihu returned with the rule and a stubby pencil, and all the evening
long he drew lines and held the paper at arm's length and frowned at
what he saw. Old Mis' Meade was in the habit of going to bed before the
others, and to-night she paused, candle in hand, to interrogate him