Uncle Phil was terribly out of sorts that day, and called poor Beck a _nigger_, and yelled furiously at some boys who were riding down hill on his premises, and swore at Bobtail because he didn’t trot faster on his way from the depot, and forgot all about the chapel, and was generally uncomfortable and disagreeable, till Edna came from school, and he found her waiting for him in the south room, with the ribbon in her hair, just as he had said he liked to see it, and the jet brightening her up, and making her a very pretty picture to contemplate, as she came forward to meet him. Hearing from Becky how forlorn he was, she put aside her own longing for the girl, who had brought so much sunshine with her, and made herself so agreeable to her uncle, that the frown between his eyes gave way at last, or rather she kissed it away, telling him she knew why it was there, and did not like to see it, and was going to be just as much like Maude as it was possible to be. “Bless my soul, a gal’s lips feel mighty curis on such a tough old rhinoceros hide as mine,” he said; but he caught the little hands which were smoothing his hair, and held them in his own, and talked of his dead sister, whom Edna was like, and of the old days at home when he was young; and then the conversation drifted to Aunt Jerusha and Roy Leighton, and the payments Edna hoped to make them both in the spring when her first quarter was ended. She would have one hundred and fifty dollars, she said, and fifty should go to Roy, and one hundred to her aunt; and she drew a comical picture of that dame when the money was received, proving that her niece’s promise had been no idle thing. “And you don’t mean to keep a cent for yourself, Dot?” Uncle Phil asked, adopting the name Maude had given to his niece, and which suited her so well. “No, not a cent till my debts are paid. I’ve clothes enough to last until that time, I guess, if I am careful. At all events I shall buy nothing unnecessary, I assure you,” Edna said; and then Uncle Phil fell into a fit of musing, and thought how for every dollar Edna paid to Jerusha Pepper and Roy, he would put a corresponding dollar in the Millville Savings Bank to the credit of Louise Overton, who might one day find herself quite a rich little woman. CHAPTER XXIII. PAYING DEBTS. Early in April, Aunt Jerry received a letter from Edna containing a draft for one hundred dollars. “All honestly earned,” Edna wrote; “and affording me more pleasure to pay it than you can well imagine. I have fifty dollars beside, which I enclose in an envelope, and wish you to send to Mr. Leighton; but don’t tell him where I am, for the world.”