“Of course you will need some things. I’ll talk with you about that in the morning. We’ll drive down to Thessaly day after to-morrow together.” Albert rose with this to go out and see Milton, and the family interview was at an end. Miss Sabrina hurried out to the kitchen, impatient to begin discussing with Alvira, as had been her wont for years, this new development in the affairs of the household. CHAPTER IX.--AT “M’TILDY’s” BEDSIDE. Lemuel Fairchild sat still, smoking his wooden pipe, and looking absently, straight ahead, into the papered wall. This habit of gazing at nothing was familiar to them all, and when, at Isabel’s suggestion, the three young people started for a stroll through the orchard path, they left him entirely without ceremony. This was growing to be the rule; no one in the family now consulted him, or took the trouble to be polite to him. He seemed to have become in his own house merely an article of animated furniture, of not much more importance than the rough-furred sickly old cat who dozed his life away back of the stove. He sat thus in solitude for some time, blankly studying the grotesque patterns in the old-fashioned wall-paper, and drawing mechanically at the pipe in his mouth, unconscious that no smoke came. Thus Miss Sabrina found him when, after a more than ordinarily sharp passage at arms with Alvira, she returned from the Kitchen. “I swaow! thet girl gits wuss tempered ’n’ more presumin’ ev’ry day o’ her life,” she exclaimed. “Who--Annie?” asked her brother, rousing himself as if from a nap. “Annie! nao! who’s talkin’ abaout _her?_” “Oh nothin’, unly I was thinkin’ ’baout Annie--‘baout her ’n’ Seth, yeh knaow,” answered Lemuel, apologetically. “Well, what abaout ’em?” The query was distinctly aggressive in tone. “Oh, nothin’ much. I was sort o’ thinkin’--well, _you_ knaow S’briny, haow Sissly used to lot on their makin’ a match of it--’n’ I was kine o’ wond’rin’ ef this here notion o’ Seth’s goin’ away wouldn’t knock it all in th’ head.” “Well?” Miss Sabrina’s monosyllabic comment had so little of sympathy or acquiescence in it, that Lemuel continued in an injured tone and with more animation, not to say resolution: “Well, I’ve hed kine of an idea o’ goin’ over ’n’ talkin’ it over with M’tildy. Mebbe that’ll be the best thing to dew.” “Oh _you_ think so, dew yeh? Thet’s all th’ pride _you’ve_ got lef’, is it? I think I see _my_self goin’ hangin’ raound Matildy Warren, beggin’ her to let her granddaughter marry a Fairchild! I’m ashamed of yeh, Lemuel.”