"Maybe, some day. Not right off, though." "I wish you would find a good wife, Tom," said Barbara without looking from her plate. "It would cheer you up." Barbara felt a little guilty at the thought of leaving the brother who had always seemed her chief responsibility. "Say, Tom, won't you wait for me?" said Janet, solemnly. [Illustration: "SAY, TOM, WON'T YOU WAIT FOR ME?"] "Yes, that's just what I'll do," said Tom, looking at her. "I hadn't thought of it before; but that's just exactly what I'll do, Janet. I'll wait for you, now you mention it." "Will you, indeed, and double deed?" "Yes, indeed, and deed and double deed, I'll wait for you, Janet." "That'll be nice," said Janet, continuing her breakfast with meditative seriousness. "Now I'm your sweetheart, ain't I?" XXXIII POSTSCRIPTUM It was in the last days of October, a few weeks after the proper close of the story which I have just related, when Henry Miller--the most matter-of-fact and unsensational of young men--threw his family into a state of excitement and supplied the gossip of the neighborhood with a fresh topic by announcing at home and abroad that he was going to leave the country, either for the Iowa country to the west of the Mississippi or for the fertile bottom-lands up north on the "Wisconse" River, as it was called. He was the only son of his father, and had inherited the steady, plodding industry and frugality so characteristic of a "Pennsylvania Dutch" race. Until he was of age he was bound, not only by law, but by the custom of the country, to serve his father much as a bondsman or an apprentice might have served, for an able-bodied son was distinctly recognized as an available and productive possession in that day. When he became of age his close-fisted father made no new arrangement with him, offered him no start, paid him no wages, and gave him no share in the produce of the fields. It was enough, in the father's estimation, that Henry would succeed to a large part of the property at his death. But Henry, on mature reflection, had made up his mind that emigration would be better than a reversionary interest that must be postponed to the death of so robust a man as his father, who was yet in middle-life and who came of a stock remarkable for longevity. Was not his grandfather yet alive in Pennsylvania, while his great-grandfather had not been dead many years? It was after calculating the "expectation of life" in the Miller family that Henry notified his father of his intention to go where land was cheap and open a large farm for himself. In vain the father urged that he could not get on without him, and that there would be no one to look after things if the father should die. Henry persisted that he must do something for himself and that his father would have to hire a man, for he should surely leave as soon as the crops were gathered, so as to get land enough open in some frontier country to afford him a small crop of corn the first year.