Even Mrs. Larrabee herself,--if there were aught spiritual about her, it must have been in the ends of her fingers. She was much given to wearing a sunbonnet, in the depths of which her thin, pallid face had a look like marble, with its keen, straight features. Her busy eye had not casual observation: she looked at the children to see if they were sick or cold or hungry; at Jerusha's husband to descry if perchance he were drunk again; at Jack Espey to discover if he wanted aught, and if he had no want or ailment she noticed him not at all. He could hardly have been more free to come and go as he would, and the long hours when he and Larrabee were away at the still passed altogether without remark. It was nevertheless to her that he resolved to open his heart. The door was ajar, and he could see that the long, loitering summer night had come at last. Through the gap in the trees the stars were visible, glowing white above the sombre mountains in the distance; he could not distinguish a constellation,--only a whorl of brilliant stellular points of light in the scant interval where the black leaves of the oak, as distinct and as dark as if cut of bronze, failed to fill the space between the threshold and the zenith. It was not long now before she would be at leisure, and sleep would silence the juvenile members of the family, except indeed the turkey, which, though unclassified amongst nocturnal fowl, was wont to pipe lugubriously in the dead watches of the night, necessitating the uprising of the mistress of the house with a draught of water and a light lunch of corn-meal batter to compose it once more to slumber. As Espey observed it gadding about on its long legs, disproportioned to the size of its body even when begirt with the cotton batting, he sagely thought that Mrs. Larrabee's tolerance toward its exacting idiosyncrasies was the result of no sense of obligation to it or its kind. "She's a powerful good-hearted woman, and smart, too," he said to himself; "she's got enough sense ter hev some feelin's."