My Aunt suspended work for the moment, and looked severely down upon me. "Well! Ira Clarence Blodgett!" she said, with grim emphasis, "I am ashamed of you! I thought you had more pride! The idea of talking about things like that with a coarse, rough, hired man—in a barn!" To hear my full name thus pronounced, syllable by syllable, sent me fairly weltering, as it were, under Aunt Susan's utmost condemnation. It was the punishment reserved for my gravest crimes. I hung my head, and felt the lamp wagging nervelessly in my hands. I could not deny even her speculative impeachment as to the barn; it was blankly apparent in my mind that the fact of the barn made matters much worse. "I was helping him wash their two-seated sleigh," I submitted, weakly. "He asked me to." "What does that matter?" she asked, peremptorily. "What business have you got going around talking with men about me?" "Why, it wasn't about you at all, Aunt Susan," I put in more confidently. "I said the Perkins girls kept calling me 'wise child,' and I asked Hi——" Aunt Susan sighed once more, and interrupted me to inspect the wick of the lamp. Then she turned again to her work, but less spiritedly now. She took up the cleaver with almost an air of sadness. "You don't understand—yet," she said. "But don't make it any harder for me by talking. Just go along and say nothing to nobody. People will think more of you." My mind strove in vain to grapple with this suggested picture of myself, moving about in perpetual dumbness, followed everywhere by universal admiration. The lamp would _not_ hold itself straight. All at once we both distinctly heard the sound of footsteps close outside. The noise of crunching on the dry, frozen snow came through the thin clap-boards with sharp resonance. Aunt Susan ceased cutting and listened. "I heard somebody rapping at the front door a spell ago," I ventured to whisper. My Aunt looked at me, and probably realized that I was too sleepy to be accountable for my actions. At all events she said nothing, but moved toward the low door of the shed, cleaver in hand. "Who's there?" she called out in shrill, belligerent tones; and this demand she repeated, after an interval of silence, when an irresolute knocking was heard on the door. We heard a man coughing immediately outside the door. I saw Aunt Susan start at the sound—almost as if she recognized it. A moment later this man, whoever he was, mastered his cough sufficiently to call out, in a hesitating way: "Is that you, Susan?" Aunt Susan raised her chin on the instant, her nostrils drawn in, her eyes flashing like those of a pointer when he sees a gun lifted. I had never seen her so excited. She wheeled round once, and covered me with a swift, penetrating, comprehensive glance, under which my knees smote together, and the lamp lurched perilously. Then she turned again, glided toward the door, halted, moved backward two or three steps—looked again at me, and this time spoke.