“Yes, I knew you were listening, you huzzy,” said Mrs. Warren grimly. “You get along up stairs, go into Annie’s room, an’ make a noise of some sort on the melodeon till I call you. Not too much noise, mind; jest enough so I can know you’re up there.” As the girl left the room, the invalid explained: “What she don’t hear, the rest of the Lawtons won’t know. That family’s as good as a detective force for the whole county.” Then, in a less amiable tone: “You might as well set down. What is it about my girl an’ Seth?” As Lemuel awkwardly seated himself near the bedside and prepared to answer, a wailing, discordant series of sounds came from the floor above. The knowledge that the girl was creating this melancholy noise to order, and on his account, confused his thought and he found himself stating the case much more baldly than he had intended. “The fact is,” he said, stroking his hat over his knee, “Seth’s thinkin’ o’ goin’ away to Tecumsy--Albert’s got him a place there--’n’ so I s’pose it’ll be all up b’twixt him ’n’ Annie.” The grandmother never took those light, searching eyes off her visitor’s face. He felt himself turning uncomfortably red under their malevolent gaze, I and wished she would speak. But she said nothing. At last he explained, deferentially: “I thought it’d only be right to tell yeh. I know Sissly ’n’ you use to talk abaout th’ thing. Th’ way she use to talk, speshly jis’ ’fore she died, it ’peared ‘s if you tew hed it all settled. But Albert’s goin’ to take th’ farm, it seems, ’n’ Seth, he’s fig’rin’ on goin’ away to be a neditor, ’n’ it looks to me’s if th’ hull plan’d fell threw.” Still no reply from the bed. He added, helplessly “Don’t it kind o’ seem so to you, M’tildy?” The wretched discords from the chamber above mocked him. The witch-like eyes from the shadows of the recess began to burn him. It was growing into the dusk, but the eyes had a light of their own, a cold, steely, fierce light. Would she never speak? How he regretted having come! “I’ll tell you what seems to me, Lemuel Fairchild,” she said at last, not speaking so rapidly now, and putting a sharp, finishing edge on each of her words. “It seems to me that there’s never been but one decent, honorable, likely human bein’ in your whole family an’ she came into it by the mistake of marrying you. I blame myself for not remembering the blood that was in you all, an’ for thinking that this youngest son of yours was different from the rest. I forgot that he was a Fairchild like the others, an’ I forgot what I owed that family of men, so mean and cowardly and selfish that they have to watch each other like so many hyenas. An’ so you’ve come to tell me that Seth has turned out like his father, like his uncle, like all of his name, eh? The more fool I, to need to be told it!”