Emma Jane Perkins, it is an ordinary Thursday afternoon at four o'clock
and you have on your new blue barege, although there is not even a
church sociable in prospect this evening. What does this mean? Is Abijah
the Brave coming at last?"

"I don't know certainly, but it will be some time this week."

"And of course you'd rather be dressed up and not seen, than seen when
not dressed up. Right, my Fair Emmajane; so would I. Not that it makes
any difference to poor me, wearing my fourth best black and white calico
and expecting nobody.

"Oh, well, YOU! There's something inside of you that does instead of
pretty dresses," cried Emma Jane, whose adoration of her friend had
never altered nor lessened since they met at the age of eleven. "You
know you are as different from anybody else in Riverboro as a princess
in a fairy story. Libby Moses says they would notice you in Lowell,
Massachusetts!"

"Would they? I wonder," speculated Rebecca, rendered almost speechless
by this tribute to her charms. "Well, if Lowell, Massachusetts, could
see me, or if you could see me, in my new lavender muslin with the
violet sash, it would die of envy, and so would you!"

"If I had been going to be envious of you, Rebecca, I should have died
years ago. Come, let's go out on the steps where it's shady and cool."

"And where we can see the Perkins front gate and the road running both
ways," teased Rebecca, and then, softening her tone, she said: "How
is it getting on, Emmy? Tell me what's happened since I've been in
Brunswick."

"Nothing much," confessed Emma Jane. "He writes to me, but I don't write
to him, you know. I don't dare to, till he comes to the house."

"Are his letters still in Latin?" asked Rebecca, with a twinkling eye.

"Oh, no! Not now, because--well, because there are things you can't seem
to write in Latin. I saw him at the Masonic picnic in the grove, but he
won't say anything REAL to me till he gets more pay and dares to speak
to mother and father. He IS brave in all other ways, but I ain't sure
he'll ever have the courage for that, he's so afraid of them and always
has been. Just remember what's in his mind all the time, Rebecca, that
my folks know all about what his mother was, and how he was born on the
poor-farm. Not that I care; look how he's educated and worked himself
up! I think he's perfectly elegant, and I shouldn't mind if he had been
born in the bulrushes, like Moses."

Emma Jane's every-day vocabulary w