“Yes, he _was_ good,” assented Aunt Affy’s sweet, old voice, “he is always ready to do the thing that’s happiest for me. He was so homesick and wrote such heart-rending letters that I couldn’t stand it. Rody sniffed, as she has always sniffed at us, but she said he might come back if we were both so set on it, so shamelessly set on it.” Judith’s little protesting groan was not noticed; then she shut her eyes and listened, because she could not help it. “It’s a burning shame, and the sister you have been to her, too. You took your money and bought your sisters out that you might keep the old place for Rody.” “I wanted it for myself, too,” was Aunt Affy’s honest reply. “But you could have taken your money and married Cephas—” “But, you see, she never could bear the thought of my marrying at all; she doesn’t dislike Cephas so much, but she wants me all to herself. She doesn’t like men, I’ll allow that; she never had any kind of happy experience herself, unless it happened before I was born, and she doesn’t _know_. After Becky died, Cephas and I had to comfort each other; Rody never was a great hand at comforting, and the other girls were all dead or married. She had been a mother to me all my life; I was a two week’s old baby left in her care; and Becky was only two years old; we were her two babies.” “You had whippings and scoldings enough thrown in, I’ll be bound,” was the visitor’s tart rejoinder. “The scoldings are thrown in now,” said Aunt Affy, with the glimmer of a smile; “I am only a girl to her; I shall never grow up to her; not old enough to be married, sixty years old as I am. Cephas told her yesterday that he would fix up the old house with his own money, he has considerable laid by, and she dared him to pull off a shingle or drive a nail. He said she should always be the head of the house, and she said there was no need for him to tell her _that_. You see that we could not be happy in making her old age unhappy. She is so old that defiance might kill her; she is eighty-four.” “I’d _let_ it kill her then,” said Miss Affy’s life-long friend. “No, you wouldn’t. Your sister is your sister, and she is all the mother I ever knew. Cephas and I jog on together like two old married folks. She says we will be glad when she is under the sod and we can have our own way.” “She might let you have it now, and then you wouldn’t be glad,” urged Jean Draper’s mother. “She cannot let us have it; her own will is too strong for her; when she gives up to us she will die.” “Then I’d do it anyway,” counselled the other voice. “We did talk of that, but we are afraid to—she is so old,” whispered Aunt Affy, feeling faint with the very thought of it. “Well, it’s an old folks’ romance, and I didn’t know old folks had any,” said the woman who was married at sixteen. But the girl on the lounge with her face in the pillow had listened; she had listened and learned something Aunt Affy would not have told her for the world.