down a peg--an' I shouldn't care if 'twas before the whole
township, too--he'd be worth more by half than he is to-day. Law! you'd
ought to seen him a hundred years ago or more, arter I gi'n him a good
spankin'. Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth."

"Oh, don't! He's comin'," Amarita begged her.

But he was not coming, and for an hour Amarita dwelt upon the plans. Her
eyes grew bright and her cheeks flushed. Once she pushed her pretty hair
back from her forehead and looked up at the old lady, as if she had
impulsive things to say. But she did not speak, and turning back to the
plans, she went absorbedly over them again. Old Mis' Meade watched her
scornfully, and yet tenderly, too. If ever a woman was a fool over a
man, she reasoned, Amarita was that fool; but in her heart she would not
have had it otherwise.

Now that the plans were virtually finished, Elihu sat over them at an
hour's stretch, testing and measuring in an extreme of accuracy.
Amarita watched him, with that bright anticipation in her face; and old
Mis' Meade, her eyes intermittently upon them, thought the long thoughts
of age, half scornful, half sympathizing, and wondered again how any
woman could be so lost in admiration over a man.

At last it was the day appointed for town meeting, and Elihu was at his
task for the last time, making a fair copy for his townsmen's eyes. It
was about four in the afternoon, and the smell of hot apple-sauce was in
the air. Amarita meant to have supper early, so that she could give her
mind untrammeled to getting her husband into his bosomed shirt and
starting him on his quest. But as she moved back and forth at her tasks
she watched him, and her eyes glittered. Old Mis' Meade noted the
excitement of her air and the double tinge of color in her cheeks.

"What's the matter, Rita?" she asked kindly, when Amarita stood for a
moment by the table between the front windows, frowning with the care
she was giving to sewing a button on a wristband. "Ain't you kinder
feverish?"

Amarita started--almost, it might have been, with some inner
consciousness not to be given away.

"Oh no," said she. "I ain't feverish, mother Meade. Maybe I'm kinder
flurried, Elihu's goin' out and all."

"Goin' to take the womenfolks along with ye, Elihu?" called the old
lady, a satirical note beating into her voice.

Elihu looked up absently from his paper.

"Why," said he, with a leniency slightly tinctured by the impatience
responsive to a foo