"How interesting!" I murmured, successfully concealing any concern at all. Sarah swooped down upon my tray and bore it to the door, in a manner which carried conviction. But we can deceive each other so little, Sarah and I. "Come last night," she volunteered, "from New York. And every girl in Green Hill is furbishing up her Sunday clothes, so Sammy said." Sammy, surnamed Simpson, the freckled-faced Mercury who delivers the milk, and is in close touch with all the divers heart-throbs of Green Hill, holds a sentimental, if unacknowledged appeal for Sarah. A century or two ago, Sammy's father, in those days a gay and unencumbered spark, courted my Sarah, so runs the story, in the public manner of Green Hill. And Sarah, difficult to believe though it be, showed him no disfavor. There was, however, an obstacle to eventual union, in the person of Sarah's invalid mother, a querulous, ninety-pound tyrant. Upon this rock the frail bark of the Simpson affections shattered. This is of history, the most ancient, but had the far-reaching result that Sarah, whose lot seems ever cast among the stricken, now waits on me heart, hand, and foot, while over the Simpson hearthstone another goddess presides, and rigidly too, if one can judge from the harrassed expressions of Sammy, Sr., Sammy, Jr., and all the other innumerable Simpson olive branches. But to return to our muttons--the palpitating girlhood of Green Hill. "Silly geese!" I commented unkindly. Sarah from the doorway looked as cryptic as is consistent with the features Nature had given her. "Oh, I don't know!" she answered with spirit, and an unconscious effect of argot, "In Green Hill, Miss Mavis, men is scarce!" Here was truth! Mentally I echoed, "They is!" and Sarah, reading ratification in my silence, achieved a disappearance of my tray, and returned to the attack. "Sammy says--he was down to the station last night when the ten-six come in--seems like," she digressed, "he's always hanging around the station since Rosie Allan's been telegraph operator there--" "Rosie is a very pretty girl, Sarah," I chided gently. "Pretty is as pretty does!" said Sarah, in irrefutable self-defense. "Limb, I call her--bold as brass! But then," she added in her most pleasant tone, "Sammy was never raised to know better." And she looked at me with that unique light in her eyes which never fails them of the mention of any Simpson delinquency, however slight. "Sammy says," she continued, bound to pursue the subject to the bitter end, "that the new doctor is a likely-looking young fellow, and seems well off." At this juncture, I opened my paper with an air of finality. "If this stranger in our midst is, as you infer, young, handsome, and wealthy," I remarked, "why then, in Heaven's name, has he descended upon Green Hill, Sarah?" I hate handsome men. They are always so much vainer than women. Sarah, accustomed as she is to my intemperate habits of speech, regarded me with a somewhat shocked air.