From that first anniversary of his entrance into the Home, Abraham felt his popularity decrease--in fact more than decrease. He saw the weather-vane go square about, and where he had known for three hundred and sixty-five days the gentle, balmy feel of the southwest zephyr, he found himself standing of a sudden in a cold, bleak northeast wind. The change bewildered the old man, and reacted on his disposition. As he had blossomed in the sunshine, so now he began to droop in the shade. Feeling that he was suspected and criticized, he began to grow suspicious and fault-finding himself. His old notion that he had no right to take a woman's place in the Institution came back to his brain, and he would brood over it for hours at a time, sitting out on the porch with his pipe and Angy. The old wife grieved to think that Father was growing old and beginning to show his years. She made him some tansy tea, but neither her persuasions nor those of the whole household could induce him to take it. He had never liked "doctoring" anyway, although he had submitted to it more or less during the past year in unconscious subservience to his desire to increase his popularity; but now he fancied that where once he had been served as a king by all these female attendants, he was simply being "pestered" as a punishment for his past behavior with Blossy. Ah, with its surprising ending that had been a humiliating affair; and he felt too that he would be long in forgiving Mrs. Darby for not having confided to him her actual intentions. Now he was afraid to be decently courteous to one of the sisters for fear that they might accuse him of light dalliance again; and he scarcely ever addressed the new member who came to take Blossy's little room, for he had been cut to the quick by her look of astonishment when she was told that he belonged there. In his mental ferment the old man began to nag at Angy. Sad though it is to confess of a hero honestly loved, Abraham had nagged a little all his married life when things went wrong. And Angeline, fretted and nervous, herself worried almost sick over Father's condition, was guilty once in a while out of the depths of her anxiety of nagging back again. So do we hurt those whom we love best as we would and could hurt no other. "I told yer I never could stand it here amongst all these dratted women-folks," Abe would declare. "It's all your fault that I didn't go to the poorhouse in peace." "I notice yew didn't raise no objections until yew'd lived here a year," Angy would retort; but ignoring this remark, he would go on: