"Go, Susan," and though Uncle Ambrose spoke with restraint his long finger pointed toward the intervening space which lay between his house and hers. "Go, afore I'm able to tell you what I think of you, 'cause I've known you from a child and you ain't changed none--fer the better. To think of you sneakin' over here fer the supreme pleasure of worryin' one poor homely old maid with your gossip and suggestin's." And Uncle Ambrose's face worked with the annoyance of frustrated old age. "Ef only 'Lizabeth had had one or two husbands she wouldn't be payin' no attention to this, but bein's as she's never had none, well, I kin see that I'm goin' to have my hands pretty nigh full. Seems like I'd rather turn a child out'n the world than this poor unrequited female." Late that evening Elizabeth gave Uncle Ambrose his supper as usual, although her eyes were so nearly closed from weeping that she was unable to catch the worried gleam in his. However, before going to bed she told him that she would have to leave him and go to her nephew's as soon as he was well enough to be about again. CHAPTER XXI "I SHALL WANT MY EM'LY." ON THAT same night Uncle Ambrose suffered a relapse and remained in bed for another week; however, he had already got sufficiently rested from his previous laying up and, besides, even at seventy-six he had not yet come to evading an issue. He was merely taking time to think. One evening just as the lamps in his room were being lighted he called Elizabeth to his bed. "I'm goin' to git up to-morrow, 'Lizabeth, and stay up; I'm 'bout as well now as I'm ever goin' to be, seein' as I'm gittin' older each day 'stid of younger," he said with the gentle firmness that had always come to him in big moments. With a nervous trembling Elizabeth smoothed the old man's pillows, tucking his blankets in more closely about him. "I'm reel glad fer you, Uncle Ambrose; then you won't be needin' me much longer." But the old man shook his head. "Set down, 'Lizabeth, I want to talk to you; I don't want my supper, leastways not yet." But when Elizabeth had seated herself by the side of his bed for a time he continued silent while his glance wandered from the spot where his daguerreotype hung alongside the wall to the figure of the elderly worried spinster, and once catching a reflection of himself in the looking glass with a night cap tied under his chin and then a vision of Elizabeth, suddenly his blue eyes under their overhanging brows brimmed over. "'Lizabeth," he inquired at length, "did I ever show you the picture of my Em'ly?" "You ain't exactly showed it to me," she replied kindly, "but I been seein' it every day when I come in here to clean; she's got a kind of different face; it's a pity she had to leave you."