This afforded Aunt Betsy a chance to reconnoiter and criticise, which last she did unsparingly. "What have they done to that bed to make it look so flat? Put on a bed-quilt, as I'm alive! What children! It would break my back to lie there, and this Cannon is none the youngest, accordin' to their tell--nigh on to thirty, if not turned. It will make his bones ache, of course. I am glad I know better than to treat visitors that way. The comforter may stay, but I'll be bound I'll make it softer!" and stealing up the stairs, Aunt Betsy brought down a second feather bed, much lighter than the one already on, but still large enough to suggest the thought of smothering. This she had made herself, intending it as a part of Katy's "setting out," should she ever marry, and as things now seemed tending that way, it was only right, she thought, that Mr. Cannon, as she called him, should begin to have the benefit of it. Accordingly, the handiwork of the girls was destroyed, and two beds, instead of one, were placed beneath the comfortable, which Aunt Betsy permitted to remain. "I'm mighty feared they'll find me out," she said, stroking, and patting, and coaxing the beds to lie down, taking great pains in the making, and succeeding so well that when her task was done there was no perceptible difference between Helen's bed and hers, except that the latter was a few inches higher than the former, and more nearly resembled a pincushion in shape. Carefully shutting the door, Aunt Betsy hurried away, feeling glad that her nieces were too much engaged in training a vine over a frame to afford them time for discovering what she had done. Katy, she knew, was going to Linwood by and by, after various little things which Mrs. Lennox thought indispensable to the entertaining of so great a man as Wilford Cameron, and which the farmhouse did not possess, and as Helen too would be busy, there was not much danger of detection. It was late when the last thing was accomplished, and the sun was quite low ere Katy was free to start on her errand, carrying the market basket in which she was to put the articles borrowed of Morris.