fit for that
child to go alone with nobody but that boy, after the fright she has
had this afternoon. She is just in the condition now when a shadow
might upset her. You really must go with her, Randolph."

"I have no intention of doing anything else, mother," Randolph
replied, laughing. He had been, indeed, taking his overcoat from the
tree in the hall when his mother had come out to speak to him.
Charlotte had said, on rising from the table, that she must go home
at once.

Mrs. Anderson enveloped the girl in her large, gentle,
lavender-scented embrace, and received with pleasant disclaimers her
assurances of obligations and thanks; then she stood in the window
and, with a little misgiving, and a ready imagination for future
trouble, watched them emerge from the little front yard and disappear
down the street under the low-growing maple branches which were
turning slowly, and flashed gold over their heads in electric lights.
She reflected judicially that while Charlotte was undoubtedly a sweet
girl, and very pretty, very pretty, indeed, and, while her own heart
was drawn to her, yet she would make no sort of wife for her son. She
remembered with a shudder Eddy's remarks at the table.

"He is a pretty little boy, too," she thought, with a maternal
thrill, remembering her own son at that age. When she returned to the
dining-room to wash the pink-and-gold cups and saucers, in her little
bowl of hot water on the end of the table, as was her custom when the
best china had been used, the maid, who was clearing the table, and
who had been encouraged to conversation from the lack of another
woman in the house, and her mistress's habit of gentle garrulity,
spoke upon the subject in her mind.

"Them was them Carrolls that lives in the Ranger place, was they
not?" said she. The maid was a curious product of the region, having
somewhat anomalously graduated at a high-school in New Sanderson
before entering service, and gotten a strange load of unassimilated
knowledge, which was particularly exemplified in her English. She
scorned contractions, but equally scorned possessives and legitimate
tenses. She wrote a beautiful hand, using quite ambitious words, but
she totally misinterpreted the meaning of these very words in current
literature, particularly the cook-book. Her bread was as heavy with
undigested facts as is the stomach of a dyspeptic with food, but she
was, in a way, a good servant, very faithful, attached to Mrs.
A