“Yes; and Dr. Holbrook said it was Mrs. Remington, from Aikenside, Mr. Guy’s step-mother, and that she was more than twenty-five years younger than her husband—isn’t it dreadful! I thought so; but the doctor didn’t seem to,” and in a perfectly artless manner Maddy repeated much of the conversation which had passed between the doctor and herself, appealing to her grandma to know if she had not taken the right side of the argument. “Yes, child, you did,” and grandma’s hands lingered among the light green peas in her pan, as if she were thinking of an entirely foreign subject. “I knows nothing about this Mrs. Remington, only that she stared a good deal at the house as she went by, even looking at us through a glass, and lifting her spotted veil after she got by. She may have been as happy as a queen with her man, but as a general thing these unequal matches don’t work, and had better not be thought on. S’posin’ you should think you was in love with somebody, and in a few years, when you got older, be sick of him. It might do him a sight of harm. That’s what spoilt your poor uncle Joseph, who’s been in the hospital at Worcester goin’ on nine years.” “It _was_!” and Maddy’s face was all aglow with the interest she always evinced whenever mention was made of the one great living sorrow of her grandmother’s life—the shattered intellect and isolation from the world of her youngest brother, who, as she said, had for nearly nine years been an inmate of a mad-house. “Tell me about it,” Maddy continued, bringing a pillow, and lying down upon the faded lounge beneath the window. “There is no great to tell, only he was many years younger than I. He’s only forty-one now, and was several years older than the girl he wanted. Joseph was smart and handsome, and a lawyer, and folks said a sight too good for the girl, whose folks were just nothing, but she had a pretty face, and her long curls bewitched him. She couldn’t have been older than you when he first saw her, and she was only sixteen when they got engaged. Joseph’s life was bound up in her, he worshiped the very air she breathed, and when she mittened him, it almost took his life. He was too old for her, she said, and then right on top of that we heard after a little that she married some big bug, I never knew who, plenty old enough to be her father. That settled it with Joseph; he went into a kind of melancholy, grew worse and worse, till we put him in the hospital, usin’ his little property to pay the bill until it was all gone, and now he’s on charity, you know, exceptin’ the little we do. That’s what ’tis about your uncle Joseph, and I warn all young girls not to think too much of nobody. They are bound to get sick of ’em, and it makes dreadful work.”