'But she is a crank, though!' said Louie. 'Why, if you make free with her things a bit, or if you call 'em by the wrong names, she'll fly at you! How's anybody to know what they're meant for?' David laughed, and got up to get some books he was repairing. As he moved away he looked back a moment. 'I say, Louie,' he began, hesitating, 'that fellow John's worked for me like a dozen, and has never taken a farthing from me. Don't you go and make a fool of him.' A flush passed over Louie's face. She lifted her hand and tucked away some curly ends of long hair that had fallen on her shoulders. 'He's like one of Aunt Hannah's suet rolies,' she said, after a minute, with a gleam of her white teeth. 'Seems as if some one had tied him in a cloth and boiled him that shape.' Neither of them cared to go to bed. They sat up talking. David was mending, sorting, and pricing a number of old books he had bought for nothing at a country sale. He knew enough of bookbinding to do the repairing with much skill, showing the same neatness of finger in it that he had shown years ago in the carving of toy boats and water-wheels. Louie went on with her work, which proved to be a curtain for her attic. She meant to have that room nice, and she had been out buying a few things, whereby David understood--as indeed Reuben had said--that she had some savings. Moreover, with regard to certain odd jobs of carpentering, she had already pressed John into her service, which explained his lingering after hours, and his eagerness among the nails. As to the furniture David had bought for her, on which, in the intervals of his busy days, he had spent some time and trouble, and of which he was secretly proud, humble and cheap as it was--she took it for granted. He could not remember that she had said any 'thank you's' since she came. Still, youth and comradeship were pleasant. The den in which they sat was warm with light and fire, and was their own. Louie's exultation, too, in their change of fortune, which flashed out of her at every turn, was infectious, and presently his spirits rose with hers, and the two lost themselves in the excitement of large schemes and new horizons. After a time he found himself comparing notes with her as to that far-off crisis of his running away. 'I suppose you heard somehow about Jim Wigson and me?' he asked her, his pulse quickening after all these years. She nodded with a little grin. He had already noticed, by the way, that she, while still living among the moors, had almost shaken herself free of the Kinder dialect, whereas it had taken quite a year of Manchester life to rub off his own Doric. 'Well, you didn't imagine'--he went on--'I was going to stop after that? I could put a knife between Jim's ribs now when I think of it!' And, pushing his book away from him, he sat recalling that long past shame, his face, glowing with vindictive memory, framed in his hands.