“Well, I may have told _you_ a time er two, Lizy, but I never went round the settlement a-tellin’ it. I reckon folks thought ef Lindy didn’t want to act up about Ann, _they_ didn’t have no call to make trouble. Lindy had her hands full anyhow, there wuz always so many runnin’ in an’ out o’ the big house. The boys got married, too, an’ some o’ the childern wuz comin’ an’ goin’ all the time. It wuz quiet over at Ann’s, an’ she wuz a lot easier in her mind after Curt died. She growed stronger, an’ begun to ’tend to the mill hersef. When her mother died, she kept right on tendin’ it. An’ she wouldn’t take nobody to live with her. Her brother’s fam’ly wuz so close she didn’t need nobody, she said. Folks would come to the mill, an’ talk pleasant, an’ hep with the liftin’, an’ Nathe couldn’t make her give it up.” But Aunt Lizy must add a bitter touch. “It’s a pity,” she said, “that he didn’t try to make Lindy give up some o’ _her_ hard work; she’d ’a’ lived longer.” “I know she worked hard,” said Uncle Ranz, “an’ the gals wuz aggervatin’, but she seemed satisfied, an’ Nathe never interfered with her about nothin’.” “I reckon,” said Uncle Dan’l, “them twenty-odd years he lived with Lindy wuz about the best o’ Nathe’s life. An’ she never opened her mouth about Ann.” “You’re fergittin’ what she said when she wuz dyin’. Lindy wuz proud o’ her nice things--all the quilts she’d pieced, an’ counterpins an’ kiverlids she’d wove, an’ rugs, an’ table-kivers, an’ curtains. When she wuz dyin’ she ast Nathe not to let Ann come in over ’em soon as she wuz dead cold. Nathe promised her he wouldn’t. ‘Ef I bring a woman in here, Lindy,’ he said, ‘she’ll have to be as smart as you’ve been.’ That pleased Lindy better’n anything he could ’a’ told her. Nathe kept his word too, an’ married a fine widder from out around Waynesville. She wuz up in years, but healthy, an’ could turn her hand to anything. Nathe wuz proud o’ the Widder Stiles when he brought her in.” “I knowed her boy, Zeb, out in Jackson County,” said Uncle Dan’l. “He wuz a smart feller, an’ went off an’ made two kinds of a doctor of hissef, a rubbin’ doctor an’ the other kind. I seen Doc Stiles when he went through here last summer.” “His mother could ’a’ come inter Silver Valley without puttin’ on airs, though,” Aunt Lizy informed us, in a tone savoring of keen reminiscence.