"How should she know all that? Jack's been writing to her and telling her the news for the last few weeks, though I haven't said a word about you because I didn't know how long your reformation was going to hold out; but I won't let the grass grow under my feet now, till I tell her just how things stand!" "You're a good woman, Louisa; I don't see why I never noticed it before." "It's because I've been concealing my goodness too much. Stay here with me to-night and don't go back to brood in that dismal, forsaken house. We'll see how Jack is in the morning, and if he's all right, take him along with you, so's to be all there together if Susanna comes back this week, as I kind of hope she will. Make Ellen have the house all nice and cheerful from top to bottom, with a good supper ready to put on the table the night she comes. You'd better pick your asters and take 'em in for the parlor, then I'll cut the chrysanthemums for you in the middle of the week. The day she comes I'll happen in, and stay to dinner if you find it's going to be mortifying for you; but if everything is as I expect it will be, and the way Susanna always did have things, I'll make for home and leave you to yourselves. Susanna ain't one to nag and hector and triumph over a man when he's repented." John hugged Louisa, pepper-and-salt shawl, black rigolette, and all, when she finished this unprecedented speech; and when he went to sleep that night in the old north chamber, the one he and Louisa had been born in, the one his father and mother had died in, it was with a little smile of hope on his lips. "Set her place at hearth and board As it used to be!" These were the last words that crossed his waking thoughts. Before Louisa went to her own bed, she wrote one of her brief and characteristic epistles to Susanna, but it did not reach her, for the "hills of home" had called John's wife so insistently on that Sunday, that the next day found her on her way back to Farnham. DEAR SUSANNA [so the letter read],--There's a new man in your house at Farnham. His name is John Hathaway, but he's made all over and it was high time. _I_ say it's the hand of God! He won't own up that it is, but I'm letting him alone, for I've done quarreling, though I don't like to see a man get religion and deny it, for all the world like Peter in the New Testament. If you haven't used up the last one of your seventy-times-sevens, I think you'd better come back and forgive your husband. If you don't, you'd better send for your son. I'm willing to bear the burdens the Lord intends specially _for_ me, but Jack belongs to you, and a good-sized heavy burden he is, too, for his age. I can't deny that, if he _is_ a Hathaway. I think he's the kind of a boy that ought to be put in a barrel and fed through the bung-hole till he grows up; but of course I'm not used to children's ways.