The last day of summer was dying out in a fierce storm of rain which swept in sheets across the Silverton hills, hiding the pond from view, and beating against the windows of the farm-house, whose inmates were nevertheless unmindful of the storm save as they hoped the morrow would prove bright and fair, such as the day should be which brought them back their Katy. Nearly worn out with constant reference was her letter, the mother catching it up from time to time to read the part referring to herself, where Katy had told how blessed it would be “to rest again on mother’s bed,” just as she had so often wished to do, “and hear mother’s voice;” the deacon spelling out by his spluttering tallow candle, with its long, smoky wick, what she had said of “darling old Uncle Eph,” and the rides into the fields; Aunt Betsy, too, reading mostly from memory the words: “Good old Aunt Betsy, with her skirts so limp and short, tell her she will look handsomer to me than the fairest belle at Newport;” and as often as Aunt Betsy read it she would ejaculate: “The land! what kind of company must the child have kept?” wondering next if Helen had never written of the _hoop_, for which she paid a dollar, and which was carefully hung in her closet, waiting for the event of to-morrow, while the hem of her pongee had been let down and one breadth gored to accommodate the hoop. On the whole, Aunt Betsy expected to make a stylish appearance before the little lady of whom she stood in awe, always speaking of her to the neighbors as “My niece, Miss Cammen, from New York,” and taking good care to report what she had heard of “Miss Cammen’s” costly dress and the grandeur of her house, where the furniture of the best chamber cost over fifteen hundred dollars. “What could it be?” Aunt Betsy had asked in her simplicity, feeling an increased respect for Katy, and consenting the more readily to the change in her pongee, as suggested to her by Helen. But that was for to-morrow when Katy came; to-night she only wore a dotted brown, whose hem just reached the top of her “bootees,” as she went to strain the milk brought in by Uncle Ephraim, while Helen took her position near the window, looking drearily out upon the leaden clouds, and hoping it would brighten before the morrow. Like the others, Helen had read Katy’s letter many times, dwelling longest upon the part which said: “I have been so bad, so frivolous and wicked here at Newport, that it will be a relief to make you my confessor, depending, as I do, upon your love to grant me absolution.”