Cavanaugh had called one evening, and as the three friends sat on the porch, the weather being warm, he had explained that his wife was still confined to her bed and was deeply regretting her inability to come over and see Tilly. But neither did the contractor help Tilly to solve the brooding enigma. On the contrary, his very reticence seemed to deepen it, for he had the disturbed air of a man avoiding some disagreeable fact. How could it be, Tilly began to ask herself, that a man so genial as John should have absolutely no women friends in the town of his birth, and why was it that even his men friends should so persistently shun his residence and show so little interest in his bride? There was Joe Tilsbury, she recalled. What a contrast, what an inexplicable contrast! Joe's friends had given the wife he had brought home a far-reaching welcome, afternoon receptions, quilting-bees, dances, straw-rides, surprise-parties, and even the jovial jokers of the village, in grotesque costumes, had serenaded the couple with tin pans and cow-horns. Tilly herself had taken part in the courtesies to the wife of a man far beneath John in point of position and attainments. What could it mean? What? Four days after the departure of her daughter, Mrs. Whaley received the third letter from Tilly, and Whaley found her one morning at her churn with that letter on her knee, the dasher inactive in a steadily extended hand. "Who's that from?" he inquired. "Oh, I see! She writes powerful often, don't she? Well, how does she like it?" Mrs. Whaley was silent, her eyes on the milk-coated hole in the churn-lid through which the worn dasher was wont to glide up and down. Noting her mood, Whaley gruffly took up the letter and, adjusting his black-rimmed nose-glasses, he read it. "What do you think of it?" she asked, when he put it down. "I don't know as I think anything much about it," was his response. "House, house, house! That is all there is in it--tables here and chairs there, a new organ, cook-stove that runs by gas, and water on tap within arm's-length--to say nothing of milk left on the front-door step, as well as a block of ice in summer-time every morning. All that, I say, but not one word about the big union-tabernacle-tent revival that Cavanaugh said was to open there this week? I'd walk ten miles through the broiling sun to meet that preacher and hear him rip the hide off of the ungodly down there. That town is just big enough to be full of hell, 'blind-tiger' joints, and houses full of shamefaced strumpets that are fined in city court and allowed to keep on even by the law in their devilish occupation." Mrs. Whaley was never known to sigh. Sighs are born of elements which she had suppressed till they had died a natural death, but there was something in her very uncommunicating manner that provoked her husband's lingering at her side. "You don't say what you think," he said, restoring his glasses to their tin case and snapping its lid down.