She wore a checked homespun dress, spotlessly clean, a dark calico apron, high-necked, buttoned to the nape in the back, shoes and blue stockings, which are rare among the children in the mountains at this season; and despite her limited inches, she was as formidable a spectacle of perfect precocity and prim perfection as ever a man who liked to go his own gait had the pleasure of looking upon. Miss Cornelia Taft was entirely competent to see all that might be going on in her small world, and she had brought her own unalterable standards with her, in her pocket as it were, by which to judge. There was a little unacknowledged weariness in her expression, and a certain stiffness as she got down out of her chair, which intimated that she was not quite equal physically to her resolution to sit up for him. He was about to requite this after the usual manner of those favored with this feminine attention, but she had begun to rake out some Irish potatoes roasting in the ashes, and Lorenzo Taft's remonstrance was subdued from his original intention. "Look-a-hyar, Sis," he said, "whyn't ye go ter bed? Ye mustn't sit up waitin' fur me this time o' night. I don't eat no second supper, nohow." But he was presently disposing of the refection of potatoes, corn bread, and buttermilk in great gulps, while she looked on with her inexpressive, unastonished eye. "Whyn't ye make Joe go to bed?" he demanded, his mouth full, as he nodded at the sleeping boy. The vaguest expression of prim repudiation was on her face. "He 'lowed he warn't sleepy," she said, with some capacity for sarcasm. She would have mended Joe as if he were a rag doll, but for his stalwart resistance. She did not expend herself in vain regrets. She had cast him and his tatters off forever, unless indeed he should come some day and sue to be made whole. "Waal," said Lorenzo Taft, bending a perplexed brow upon her, "jes' let him be, an' ye go on upsteers an' go to bed. Ye'll never grow no higher ef ye set up so late in the night." She turned obediently toward the stairs, or rather a rude ladder that ascended to the loft, while Lorenzo Taft paced back and forth in the room with a long, elastic stride, troubled and absent, and only conscious at the last moment that it was a look of the keenest curiosity that the little girl's placid eyes cast down upon him as she disappeared amongst the shadows of the loft. He stood still, disproportionately perturbed, it might seem. Then he sought to reassure himself.