"When's he goin' to take his furniture away?" continued aunt Belinda, with the persistence of her kind. "Don't know. Mebbe he ain't goin' to take it. Mebbe he's goin' to marry Letty. 'Pears to me I heard a kind of a rumor she was goin' to marry 'fore long." Aunt Belinda shook her head at him. "Don't talk so about a nice respectable woman," said she. "An' she goin' to move away from us an' live nobody knows where. It's a shame." The cap'n burst into a laugh that aunt Belinda privately thought coarse, and turned back into the house, while she joined a group of matrons and went away home, discoursing volubly. Cap'n Oliver stopped for a minute at the window in the empty parlor, watching their departing bulk, and then went into the hall, where the tread of many invading feet had left the moist autumn soil, with bits of grass and now and then a yellowed leaf. "Letty!" he called roundly. There was a light step above, and then Miss Letty's voice, a very little voice suited to the dusk and stillness, came down the stairs. "Be they gone?" she faltered. "Yes," said the cap'n, "they're gone, every confounded one of 'em." "Did they take the things with 'em?" inquired Miss Letty. "I didn't dast to look. I knew I couldn't help feelin' it if I see 'em all loaded up with things I knew." "You come down here, Letty," said the cap'n. "I want to say a word to you." She did come, wondering, her face sodden with tears, and a miserable little ball of a wet handkerchief in her grasp. The cap'n met her at the foot of the stairs and, without warning, took her by the shoulders and shook her slightly, why, he did not know, except perhaps as a warning to put a prettier face on the matter. Then he drew her into his arms with a conclusiveness it would have been difficult to resist, and kissed her soft wet cheeks. He kissed them a good many times, and ended by touching her trembling mouth. "There," said the cap'n, "I don't know 's I ever kissed you before, Letty, but I expect to a good many times again, off 'n' on." "Oh, yes, you did once," said Miss Letty, with unexpected frankness and simplicity. "'Twas the eighteenth of November, thirty years ago this very fall." The cap'n looked at her and broke into a wondering laugh. "Letty," said he, "you're the beateree, an' I'm a nat'ral-born fool. You're goin' to marry me right off as soon as I can get the license." "An' live over to your house an' not go to Chicago?" inquired Miss Letty beatifically. "Course you won't go to Chicago, unless we go together some spring or fall an' make 'em a visit an' show 'em we've got suthin' to live for as well as they have." "Then I needn't have sold my furniture," said she, with a happy turn of logic.