She wanted to tease him dreadfully, but something in his manner forbade it; she must deal openly with him, and so she replied frankly and honestly, “I do love you, Roy, and am willing to be your wife, only I had promised myself never to marry until the whole of my indebtedness to you was paid. I have been extravagant since I have been at Leighton, where I saw so much of dress. I have not paid you as fast as I might have done. I still owe you——” “Seventy-five dollars, I believe,” Roy said, interrupting her, and adding, laughingly: “It was a foolish thing, your trying to be so independent, but since you have been, and there is still something my due, suppose we make it an even thing, and you give yourself in lieu of the money——” “Which will make me worth just seventy-five dollars to you. I hoped you valued me higher than that,” Edna said, pretending to look aggrieved, while Roy bent down and kissed her pouting lips, and said that to her which told that money could not liquidate the price at which he held her, and that to lose her now would be to lose the very brightness of his life, and leave it all a blank. While they sat there too much absorbed in each other to heed the lapse of time, or hear first the bell, and then the tin horn, which Aunt Jerry in her impatience had used alternately as a reminder of dinner, that worthy spinster herself suddenly appeared before them, her brow clouded, and her mouth puckered up in the peculiar fashion which Edna knew was indicative of displeasure. Aunt Jerry’s first act after Roy had left the house in quest of Edna, was to unhitch the check-rein of the horse standing at the gate, and her second to give it water and handfuls of the tall grass growing near. Kindness to brutes was a part of her nature, and nothing which had life was ever in danger of being ill-used where she was, unless it were a child. For children she had not a great deal of love; but where animals were concerned she was a second Bergh, and she cared for Roy’s horse and patted its neck, and when she saw how high it threw its head at first, and how it shrank from her, she said: “Poor critter! I know by the way you act that your keeper abuses you. No horse kindly used is ever as nervous as that. The wretch! I wish I had him by the nape of the neck!” When the horse was cared for, the dame, with thoughts intent on dinner, pounced upon a group of fowls feeding at her back-door, and catching the youngest, fattest one, had its neck off in a trice, and picked, and dressed, and had it in the pot within an hour after. Aunt Jerry’s forte in cookery was _pot-pie_, and she now did her best, and made such a crust, as, to use a common culinary phrase, would almost “melt in one’s mouth.” White and light, and flaky, it looked like bats of cotton wool, and her spirits rose proportionably as she arranged her table and prepared her vegetables.