"Pooh! That's in a novel. Why, Philip might as well get up a romantic passion for--for the Sistine Madonna." "Which would be exactly like him," commented Jemima; but Jacqueline dismissed the absurdity from her mind with another laugh. From day to day now, Kate put off the breaking of her news. "Not yet," she pleaded with her better judgment. "I will wait till everything is settled." She waited a day too long. Jemima had driven down to the crossroads store for some pressing necessity of the sewing-room. Like many country stores, it combined the sale of groceries, fishing-tackle, hardware, dry-goods, and other commodities with the sale of wet-goods, the latter being confined to the rear portion of the establishment, opening upon a different road from the front portion. The proprietor's wife, who usually managed the dry-goods and groceries' section, happened to be absent at the time, and the proprietor's unaccustomed efforts to find the buttons Jemima needed aroused her quick impatience. "Never mind--let me find them myself, Mr. Tibbits," she urged. "I'll put them down in your book. There's a customer in the back store. Do go and attend to him." Tibbits meekly obeyed, murmuring, "You might find them buttons on the shelf with the canned goods, or then agin they might be under the counter behind them bolts of mosquito-bar." So it happened that Jemima was on her knees behind the counter, quite invisible, when two women in sunbonnets entered, deep in a congenial discussion of their betters, such as might have been heard in a dozen homes in the vicinity that day. They had failed to recognize the buggy at the door as a Storm equipage. "What I want to know is how's she ever goin' to manage with the two of them at once. They do say the young parson's sort of took his father's place with her." "Laws! I should think she'd be ashamed. Her old enough to be his mother!" "No, she ain't, either. She wa'n't twenty, nothin' like, when Mr. Kildare brought her here, and the French doctor's boy must a-been about ten then. Ten years or less ain't such a heap of difference, not when you hold your looks the way she does. Anyway, they been seen kissin'." "You don't say!" The informer nodded, pursing her lips. "It come to me pretty straight. That old nigger Zeke, who does chores about, seen 'em with his own eyes, and tol' me about it next day when he was doin' some work in my patch. Said he caught 'em kissin' and just carryin' on, right in the public road." "The idea! What for do you s'pose they want the father pardoned out, then? She got up the petition herself. Laws, what a mix-up! I shouldn't think she'd dare have anything to do with either of them. Don't look good, does it? Him killin' her husband and all." It was here that the girl behind the counter, flushed and furious and just about to speak, suddenly lost her color.