“Don’t for goodness’ sake come here again on that business, and do let Edna alone. She nor no other woman is worth the powder you are wasting on her. If she don’t answer your letter, and tell you she’s in the seventh heaven because of your engagement, it’s pretty likely she ain’t thrown off her balance with joy by it. She didn’t fancy that woman with a boy’s name none too well when she saw her in Iona, and if I may speak the truth, as I shall, if I speak at all, it was what she overheard that person say to her brother about you and your mother’s opinion of poor girls like her, that kept her from going to Leighton with the body, and it’s no ways likely she’ll ever go now, so long as the thing with the boy’s name is there as mistress. So just let her alone and it will work itself out. Anyway, don’t bother me with so many letters, when I’ve as much as I can do with my house-cleaning, and making over comforters, and running sausages. “Yours to command, “JERUSHA AMANDA PEPPER.” It was Roy’s duty to feel indignant toward one who called his wife elect, “that thing with a boy’s name,” and he made himself believe he was, and styled her a very rude, impertinent woman, and then he thought of what she had said about Edna’s disapproval of the match, and of Georgie’s treatment of her in Iona, and that hurt him far worse than Miss Pepper’s calling his betrothed “that thing with the boy’s name.” What could Georgie have said or done to Edna? She had always seemed so kindly disposed toward the girl, and since their engagement had warmly seconded his plan of finding her, and bringing her home. Once he thought to speak to Georgie herself on the subject, but generously refrained from doing so, lest she should be pained by knowing there was any one who was not pleased with the prospect of her being his wife. But Georgie, who was not overscrupulous with regard to other people’s property, found the letter on the library table, where he left it, and unhesitatingly read it through, and then that same afternoon took occasion, in Edna’s presence, to ask Roy if he had heard from his sister yet, and to express herself as _so_ sorry that they could not find where she was. “Poor little creature, so young and so childlike as she seemed when I saw her at Iona,” she said, flashing her great eyes first upon Roy and then upon Miss Overton. “And so shy too of strangers. Why, I almost fancied that she was afraid of _me_, she was so timid and reserved, and possibly she was, for in my excitement I might have been a little brusque in my manner.” “I do not remember asking if you urged her to come here at that time,” Roy said, thinking of Miss Pepper’s letter, while Georgie, thinking of it too, replied without the least hesitation: