At the Mather mansion matters remained about the same as when Jimmie first came home. Mrs. Carleton was still there, waiting for her other son, and Rose, as usual, was ever on the alert, seeking ways and means by which the soldiers might be benefited, compelling Jimmie to be interested in all her plans, dragging him from place to place, sending him on errands; and once, when in a great hurry to get a box in readiness for the hospitals at Washington, actually coaxing him into helping _tie_ a _comfortable_, which was put up in her back parlor, and which she “must send immediately, for some poor fellow was sure to need it.” “Jimmie could learn to tie as well as herself,” she said, when he pleaded his ignorance as an excuse for refusing his services. “She didn’t know how once, but Widow Simms and Annie had taught her a heap, and Annie would teach him, too. All he had to do was to put the big darning needle through twice, tie a weaver’s knot, cut it off, and the thing was done; besides that, ’twas a real pretty quilt, made from Annie’s calico dress, which she used to wear last summer and look _so_ sweetly in. Annie was tying on one side and Jimmie must tie on the other; he needn’t be so lazy. He ought to do something for the war.” By the time Rose had reached the last points in her argument, Jimmie had closed the book he was reading, and concluded that there might be duties required of him a great deal worse than tying a soldier’s comfortable with Annie to oversee! It was strange how much teaching he needed, and how often Annie was called to the rescue. The needle would stick so in the cotton, and he could not remember just how to tie that knot. So Annie, never dreaming that he knew how to tie the knot as well as she, would come to his aid, her hands sometimes touching his, and his black curls occasionally brushing her pale, brown braids as he bent over her to see how she did it so as to know himself next time! There was a world of mischief in Jimmie’s saucy eyes as he demurely apologized to Mrs. Graham for the trouble he was giving her, but Annie never once looked up, neither did the color deepen in the least upon her cheek, and when Jimmie, on purpose to draw her out, suggested that “he was more bother than help,” she answered that he “had better return to his reading, as she could get on quite as well alone.”