“Oh, Uncle Martin,” she coaxed innocently, “let me try my luck alone first. Bill can tell me who the different men are and if I know he's waiting for me outside in the buggy, it will keep me from being scared.” And her young cousin, only too pleased with the proposed arrangement, chimed in with: “That's the stuff, Rose. Folks have got to go it on their own, to get anywhere.” By evening she had a position in an insurance agent's office with wages upon which she could live with fair decency. As it had rained all day and her employer wanted her to begin the next morning, she had the best possible excuse for renting a room in Fallon and asking Bill to ride in horseback with some things which she would ask Aunt Rose, over the telephone, to pack. It rained all the next day, too, and Sunday, when she met Mrs. Wade and Bill at church, she told them she had some extra typing she had promised to do by Monday. “No, auntie, this week it is really and truly just impossible, but next week--honest and true!” she insisted as the older woman seconded rather impersonally her son's urgent invitation to chicken and noodles. Soon winter was upon them in good earnest, and Rose's visits “home,” as she always called it, were naturally infrequent. By Christmas time, she was receiving attentions from Frank Mall, Nellie's second son, a young farmer of twenty-five. To Mrs. Wade's everlasting credit, she never twitted Martin with this, although she knew it from Rose's own lips, a month before he heard of it through Bill. She was too grateful for their narrow escape to feel vindictive and might have convinced herself they had merely endured a bad nightmare if it had not been for the shiny Victrola; the sight of it underscored the whole experience and she wished there were some way to get rid of the thing, a wish that was echoed even more fervently by Martin. In the evenings they would sit around the cleared supper table, she doing odd jobs of mending, Martin reading, checking up the interest dates on his mortgages or making entries in his account book, while Bill at his books, would study to the accompaniment of record after record, blissfully unconscious of what a thorn in the flesh he and his music were to both his parents.