“No, sir! When I’m bound, I’m bound,” he said to some friends who were questioning him. “I don’t know nothing, and if I did, I’m not to tell. Wait and you’ll see. Fred Lansing has a right to do as he pleases—marry anybody he likes; and, by George, he’s got a smart little cat, if she is Grey’s girl; might have had—” Here he checked, himself, thinking it better not to tell that Grey’s girl had declined the honor of a marriage with his son. “Yes, sir,” he continued, “Fred has a right to do as he pleases, with all his money and blood—the bluest in the land, and his pedigree going back to the Garden of Eden, for what I know. Yes, sir; and if he brings his wife here we ought to do something out of the common—fireworks, or something—set pieces; one the two banks as they used to be; only you couldn’t blow up one without the other, and mine stood. Yes, sir, it stood!” Every word the judge said was repeated, and more, too; and when next morning Nancy Sharp saw Mr. Blake, who came to the house, she pounced upon him and nearly shook the breath out of him in her fierce demands for the truth. “Can you keep a secret, Nancy?” Mr. Blake asked; and for answer she produced a Bible nearly a hundred years old, which had belonged to her mother, and offered to swear upon it to be silent as the grave if he would tell her what she believed she already knew. He did not require the oath, but he told her; and with a cry of “Glory Hallelujah!” the old woman began to imitate a skirt dance she had seen in a travelling show, and thought rather immoral. Nothing was immoral now, if it gave vent to her joy; nothing too complicated; and she not only tried the skirt dance, but the Highland fling she had learned when a girl. She was sure to stay where she was, and she refused the next washing brought her; said she was out of the business, and if folks waited a spell they’d know why. The next two weeks she devoted to cleaning the part of the house she had occupied, and picking up every dried leaf and stick in the grass, and pulling every weed in the garden and flower beds. More artistic hands than hers had arranged the rooms with flowers and ferns and potted plants and palms on the June day when Fred Lansing and his bride were expected. They had been in New York a week, and now, with Fred’s mother and Miss Percy, were coming to Merivale—as guests of Judge White, Louie thought; and the belief marred a little the pleasure of her home-coming. Herbert had written a letter of congratulation, in which he had said: “I am glad for you, Louie, but cannot forget that I once hoped to be to you what Fred is. If there is any good in me, I owe it to you. God bless you. I shall never marry. “HERBERT.” There were tears in Louie’s eyes when she read this, but Fred kissed them away, and then began to talk of the joy of being in Merivale again and meeting her friends, who, Mr. Blake wrote, were anxiously waiting to see her.