“No,” she answered, “I ain’t sick.” “Then why under the sun didn’t choo come when I hollowed?” “I didn’t want to.” Her tone was icy. He stared at her a full minute. Then he burst out laughing. “Oh, say, Emarine, yuh can be the contrariest girl I ever see! Yuh do love to tease a fellow so. Yuh’ll have to kiss me fer that.” He went toward her. She pushed her chair back and gave him a look that made him pause. “How’s your mother?” she asked. “My mother?” A cold chill went up and down his spine. “Why—oh, she’s all right. Why?” She took a small gold ring set with a circle of garnets from her finger and held it toward him with a steady hand. “You can take an’ show her this ring, an’ tell her I ain’t so awful anxious to stock her up on table cloths an’ napkeens as she thinks I am. Tell her yuh’ll get some other girl to do her knucklin’-down fer her. I ain’t that kind.” The young man’s face grew scarlet and then paled off rapidly. He looked like a man accused of a crime. “Why, Emarine,” he said, feebly. He did not receive the ring, and she threw it on the floor at his feet. A whole month she had slept with that ring against her lips—the bond of her love and his! Now, it was only the emblem of her “knuckling-down” to another woman. “You needn’t to stand there a-pretendin’ you don’t know what I mean.” “Well, I don’t, Emarine.” “Yes, you do, too. Didn’t you promise your mother that if there was any knucklin’-down to be did, I’d be the one to do it, an’ not her?” “Why—er—Emarine—” She laughed scornfully. “Don’t go to tryin’ to get out of it. You know you did. Well, you can take your ring, an’ your mother, an’ all her old duds. I don’t want any o’ you.” “Emarine,” said the young man, looking guilty and honest at the same time, “the talk I had with my mother didn’t amount to a pinch o’ snuff. It wa’n’t anything to make yuh act this way. She don’t like yuh just because I’m goin’ to marry yuh”— “Oh, but you ain’t,” interrupted Emarine, with an aggravating laugh. “Yes, I am, too. She kep’ naggin’ at me day an’ night fer fear yuh’d be sassy to her an’ she’d have to take a back seat.” “I’ll tell you what’s the matter with her!” interrupted Emarine. “She’s got the big-head. She thinks ev’ry body wants to rush into her old house, an’ marry her son, an’ use her old things! She wants to make ev’rybody toe _her_ mark.” “Emarine! She’s my mother.” “I don’t care if she is. I w’u’dn’t tech her with a ten-foot pole.” “She’ll be all right after we’re married, Emarine, an’ she finds out how—how nice yuh are.” His own words appealed to his sense of the ridiculous. He smiled. Emarine divined the cause of his reluctant amusement and was instantly furious. Her face turned very white. Her eyes burned out of it like two fires. “You think I ain’t actin’ very nice now, don’t you? I don’t care what you think, Orville Parmer, good or bad.” The young man stood thinking seriously.