"Ha! fooling away your time same's usual, are you?" snapped the invalid, disapproval written large on her querulous features. "She's feeling pretty well, for her," Mr. Moore said placidly. "But we hate to see winter coming. Then she can't get out of doors so much." "I wish you would let me take you out in the car sometimes, Mrs. Moore," Janice said, smiling. "You could see the country while it is so beautiful." "Huh! risk my neck and bones bein' driven about in one o' them things by a silly girl? Not much!" "I guess she'd feel safer if I was shoofer," said Cross Moore grimly. "And I've a mind to get one o' them things next year." "You will _not_, Cross Moore!" cried his wife, who made it a practice to oppose every suggestion--verbally, at least. "Oh, I dunno," said the man cheerfully. "You know I've shoofered you in this here chair for many a year without an accident. I reckon I could graduate to an automobile seat pretty easy." "Why! it's just as e-asy to learn," Janice said, smiling. "And think how far and how quickly you could go, Mrs. Moore." "Huh! Why should I wish to go far or quick--me that ain't walked right for ten years? I've got all over sech desires." "Wait till you have tried it," Janice cried as she touched the self-starter and the engine began to purr again. "Now, ain't that mighty nice, Mother?" they heard Cross Moore say to the fretful woman. "To go spinning about the old roads around Polktown would do you good." "Oh, you got more uses for your money, Cross Moore, than flitterin' it away on sech things. If you spent money as careless as them Days does,--look at the hole Jase Day is into right now--_you'd_ be 'Owin" Moore, 'stead o' Cross Moore." "Do you know," Lottie said to Janice as they drove on, "I think Miz' Cross Moore would be lots happier if--maybe--she had an echo." "An echo?" "Yes," the child said, nodding her head. "Like me. You know, _I_ should have been awfully lonesome, and maybe as short-tempered as she is, if I couldn't have talked to my echo." "Why?" Janice asked curiously, for the philosophy of the little girl interested her. "Why," Lottie said, still speaking seriously, "my echo was worse off than I was. Yes it was. It couldn't get away from where it was--not even to fly across the cove--unless I told it to. It had to stay right there in the pine woods on Pine Point. But even while I was blind I could find my way about." "Very true," agreed Janice, likewise serious. "The echo is a poor little prisoner." "So it is! so it is!" laughed Lottie gayly, for these queer little imaginings and fancies were part of her very nature. Then she grew grave once more. "You 'member how I went to look for it that time, and it snowed so hard, and Mr. Nelson Haley came to find me? He found me, but I never did find out just where that echo lived. I was 'most afraid it had gone for good, but it was there yet the last time I was down here."