A sudden babbling intruded upon the conversation. The youthful Kittredge, as he sat upon the wide flat stones of the hearth, was as unwelcome here in the Cove as a Quimbey had been in the cabin on the mountain. The great hickory fire called for his unmixed approval, coming in, as he had done, from the gray wet day. He shuffled his bare pink feet--exceedingly elastic and agile members they seemed to be, and he had a remarkable “purchase” upon their use--and brought them smartly down upon their heels as if this were one of the accepted gestures of applause. Then he looked up at the dark frowning faces of his mother's brothers, and gurgled with laughter, showing the fascinating spectacle of his two front teeth. Perhaps it was the only Kittredge eye that they were not willing to meet. They solemnly gazed beyond him and into the fire, ignoring his very existence. He sustained the slight with an admirable cheerfulness, and babbled and sputtered and flounced about with his hands. He grew pinker in the generous firelight, and he looked very fat as he sat in a heap on the floor. He seemed to have threads tightly tied about his bolster-shaped limbs in places where elder people prefer joints--in his ankles and wrists and elbows--for his arms were bare, and although his frock of pink calico hung decorously high on one shoulder, it drooped quite off from the other, showing a sturdy chest. His mother took slight notice of him; she was beginning to look about the room with a certain critical disfavor at the different arrangement of the household furniture adopted by her father's deaf and widowed old sister who presided here now, and who, it chanced, had been called away by the illness of a relative. Evelina got up presently, and shifted the position of the spinning-wheels, placing the flax-wheel where the large wheel had been. She then pushed out the table from the corner. “What ailed her ter sot it hyar?” she grumbled, in a disaffected undertone, and shoved it to the centre of the floor, where it had always stood during her own sway. She cast a discerning glance up among the strings of herbs and peppers hanging from above, and examined the shelves where the simple stores for table use were arranged in earthen-ware bowls or gourds--all with an air of vague dissatisfaction. She presently stepped into the shed-room, and there looked over the piles of quilts. They were in order, certainly, but placed in a different method from her own; another woman's hand had been at work, and she was jealous of its very touch among these familiar old things to which she seemed positively akin. “I wonder how I made out ter bide so long on the mounting,” she said; and with the recollection of the long-haired Absalom there was another gush of tears and sobs, which she stifled as she could in one of the old quilts that held many of her own stitches and was soothing to touch.