"'Lizabeth can't come, you know it well as I do, Ambrose Thompson," she replied. "I've just got to do the best fer you I kin, though it ain't noways convenient to me. This comes from you tryin' to live alone 'cause Aunt Ca'line and the others who used to see to you is passed. 'Lizabeth Horton is movin' within a few hours, bein' turned out of her house, bag and baggage," and there was such richness of superiority in Susan Jr.'s voice, the kind of superiority which the prosperous always feel in the presence of the unprosperous, that the old man longed to shake her. But instead he only remarked with suspicious meekness: "'Lizabeth's furniture is bein' moved, Susan Jr., but not necessar'ly 'Lizabeth; leastways I don't believe she is engaged to go off in the movin' van settin' on top her best dresser like a hen, though it's what a lot of women would like, they're so bound up in things mortal." And then Uncle Ambrose fixing his gaze on a far spot in the ceiling shivered and groaned until his audience hurried away, when he was able to relax into greater comfort. Thus it was that 'Lizabeth took up the business of caring for Uncle Ambrose Thompson until such time as the lumbago should depart from his back. [Illustration: "Thus it was that 'Lizabeth took up the business of caring for Uncle Ambrose Thompson"] From the first the old man could see that the spinster was enjoying herself thoroughly; true, his cottage was small, but then it was exactly like her own save that he had let his grow truly magnificent in its dirt and disorder, being not of the type of male with perverted feminine instincts, while Elizabeth never had had but one womanly passion gratified and that was her love of putting a house to rights. So for some little time Uncle Ambrose rather found pleasure in staying in bed with the hateful burden of solitariness removed from him; he loved listening to the familiar homely sounds of sweeping and the moving about of furniture; it brought back--ah well, perhaps at seventy-six it is something to have many things to remember. And then, lying alone, he used to talk very often to his picture of Emily, which still hung on its nail by the old pine bureau, for this habit, begun after her death and only practised in secret during his marriage to Peachy, had grown on him in these last seven years of failing body and mind.