"I d' know," Hannah remarked, after an unusually long interval of silence this afternoon, "what's set me thinkin' so much 'bout George and Miss Edith as I hev' lately. Seems ef things took hold o' me more the older I get." A new look of intelligence and alertness came into Sarah's face. She knit out the last stitches upon her needle, and looked down over the river, where a little sail-boat was trying to beat up to the village with a breeze so light as to seem the mere ghost of a wind. The story of the hapless loves of her son and Edith Grayman was sure to be touched upon some time in the course of every afternoon when she and Hannah sat together, and she was conscious of having to-day a fresh item to add to the history. "I had a letter from George yesterday," she said, approaching her news indirectly that the pleasure of telling it might last the longer. "Did you?" asked Hannah, almost with animation. "I want to know." "Yes," Sarah answered, a softer look coming into her bright gray eyes. "Yes, and a good letter it was." "George was always a master hand at writin'," Hannah responded. "He is a regular mother's son. He would n't tell a lie to save his right hand." "No," Sarah responded, understanding perfectly that this apparently irrelevant allusion to the veracity of her son had a direct bearing upon the difficulties which had beset his wooing; "when Mr. Grayman asked him if he had been makin' love to Miss Edith, he never flinched a mite. He spoke up like a man. There never was a Souther yet that I ever heard of that 'u'd lie to save himself." She laid her knitting down upon her lap and fixed upon the little boat a regard which seemed one of the closest attention, yet which saw not the white sloop or the dingy sail with its irregular patch of brown. Some tender memory touched the eternally young motherhood in her aged bosom, and some vision of her absent son shut out from her sense the view of the realities before her. "He would n't 'a' been his mother's son if he had 'a' lied," Hannah remarked, with a sincerity so evident that it took from the words all suspicion of flattery. "Or his father's either," Sarah said. "I never set out that Phineas had much go to him, but he was a good man, and he was as true as steel." "Yes," her sister assented, as she would have assented to any proposition laid down by Mrs. Souther, "yes, he was that." They sat for a moment in silence. Sarah resumed her knitting, and once more became conscious of the lagging sloop. "That's likely Ben Hatherway's boat," she remarked. "If he don't get on faster, he'll get caught in the turn of the tide and carried out again." Hannah glanced toward the boat in a perfunctory way, but she was too deeply interested in the theme upon which the talk had touched to let it drop, and her mind was hardly facile enough to change so quickly from one subject to another. "What did George say?" she asked. "You said it was a good letter."