"Company would track dust so for me," Cassie would have said if any one had suggested that some companions of his own age might do David good and might not be a bad thing for his elders. "When you have fires, you have ashes, and I would then have to clean my house in the middle of winter when you cannot clean the carpets right." Cassie Hartman was a beautiful woman, how beautiful Millerstown, which set a higher value upon mere prettiness than upon beauty, did not know. Her figure was tall and full and she bore herself with grace and dignity. Her face with its even features and its full gray eyes was the face of an austere saint, although her eyes, lifting when you addressed her, seemed rather to hide her real character than reveal it. But her character was austere and reserved, of that you were sure. If Cassie's soul was a consecrated one, the gods to whom one would have assigned her worship were Cleanliness and Order. The very progress of her husband and son about the house annoyed her because it was masculine and untidy. David knew better than to enter the kitchen with muddy shoes, but his father was not so careful; therefore both trod upon an upper layer of slightly worn rag carpet, superimposed upon the bright and immaculate lower layer. In all other details but one of the management of her house Cassie had her way. Her husband refused stubbornly to leave the great walnut bed and the large room in which he slept for a smaller room at the back of the house, as Cassie wished, so that the great best bedrooms might be garnished day and night with their proper spreads and counterpanes and shams. Each of Cassie's days and hours had its appointed task. She could have told how her time would be spent from now on until the last hour before her passing, when the preacher would come in the proper Lutheran fashion to give her the communion. The Church required no such ceremony, but Cassie was a formalist in religion and required it for herself. So the three Hartmans ate alone in their broad kitchen, John Hartman at one end of the table, Cassie far away at the other, and David midway between them. John Hartman's eyes were hardly lifted above his food; he was an intolerably silent person. Cassie's eyes roved everywhere, from her stove, which she could scarcely wait to blacken, toward her husband who ate carelessly, and toward her son, who devoured his drumstick with due regard for the clean cloth. The cloth was spotless and would probably remain spotless, for an extra white cover had been laid beneath the plates of John and David. But to-morrow it would go into the tub, none the less. It was too good to be used every day, and it could not be put away bearing even the slight wrinkles produced by unfolding. Cassie had no more to say than her husband. There was really nothing for Cassie to say. Her mental processes involved herself and her house, they responded to no inspiration from without.