"Well, Ann," she said gloomily, "I ain't got any news for ye. He wa'n't there, arter all, though there'd been a fire an' they found he cooked himself some eggs. But they're goin' to beat up the woods arter breakfast, an' if he's above ground he's goin' to be took." Ann could scarcely sober her smiling mouth. "You tell 'em it's all right," she announced jubilantly. "Where do you s'pose I found it? In my bedroom, arter all." Mrs. John C. regarded her with blighting incredulity. Ann had been guiltily careless, and yet she expressed no grief over the trouble she had made. It was beyond belief. "Ann Barstow," said she, "you don't mean to tell me you had this whole township up traipsin' the woods all night, an' me without a wink o' sleep, an' that tea-set in your bedroom, arter all?" Ann did flush guiltily. Her eyes fell. "You beseech 'em not to think hard of me," she urged. "I never do put it in my bedroom,--you know yourself them two places I keep it in,--but there 'twas." Mrs. John C. turned majestically to be gone. She spoke with an emphasis that seemed, even to her, inadequate. "Well, Ann Barstow, I should think you was losin' your mind." "Mebbe I be," said Ann, joyously, following her to the door. "Mebbe I be. But there's my tea-set. I'm terrible pleased." THE OTHER MRS. DILL Mrs. Dill and her husband, Myron, grown middle-aged together, and yet, even through the attrition of the years, no more according in temperament than at the start, sat on opposite sides of the hearth and looked at each other, he with calmness, from his invincible authority, and she fluttering a little, yet making no question but of a dutiful concurrence. She had bright blue eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses, a thin face with a nose slightly aquiline, and reddish hair that was her cross, because it curled by nature and she constrained it. Sometimes, when it kinked unusually, either in moist weather or because she had forgotten to smooth it, and when the pupils of her eyes enlarged under cumulative excitement, she looked young and impetuously willful; but the times were rare, and perhaps her husband had never, since their courting days, noted any such exhilaration. He was a large, imperious-looking man, with a cascade of silvery beard which he affected to tolerate because the expenditure of time in shaving might be turned with profit into the channel of business or of worship; but his wife, noting how he stroked the beard at intervals of meditation, judged that he was moved by something like pride in its luxuriance. Then she chided herself for the thought. It was balmy spring weather, but they had taken their places at the hearthstone from old habit when a matter of importance had to be considered. Their two chairs were the seats of authority in the domestic realm.