Sally had looked upon this house many times and with conflicting thoughts as she passed it now and then. An air of neglect and loneliness hung about the spot. The house, hopelessly ugly and angular, was set far back from the road in the midst of a large yard given over to weeds and untrimmed shrubbery, while a clump of gloomy-looking cedars defied even the brightness of sun and sky. "You can't put credit into everything you hear," admonished Mrs. Brown, breaking ruthlessly into her daughter's musings. "Besides, a spry young girl can pretty much have her own way when she marries a man so much older than herself. "There's Serena Lowe, that use' to be," she continued, reminiscently. "She an' her fam'ly was about as poor as Job's turkey when we went to school together, an' many's the time I've divided my dinner with her because she didn't seem to have any too much of her own. "But she had a downright pretty face--all white an' pink, like a doll's--an' it helped her to ketch old Bartholomew Rice, an' now she rides around in her own kerridge an' pair, mind you, an' no prouder woman ever lived this minute. You'd think from the airs she gives herself that she was born in the best front room on a Sunday. "The Squire's as good as hinted to me that if he could marry the one he wants, he wouldn't in the least mind goin' to the expense of paintin' an' fixin' up the place till you wouldn't know it," insinuated Mrs. Brown, dropping her voice to a more confidential tone. "He'd have to paint an' fix hisself up, too, till you wouldn't know _him_, either, before I'd even so much as look at him," tartly asserted Sally. "A tidy young wife could change his looks an' the looks of the house in a mighty little while, if she only had a mind to do so," suggested Mrs. Brown, in subtly persuasive tones. "It must be dreadful lonesome livin' as he does, with nobody to look after things." "He might have kept his nephew for company," insisted Sally, with a sudden ring of resentment in her voice. "He drove him away." "Which likely he wouldn't have done if Milt hadn't been so headstrong an' wild. You know the Squire's goin' to have his own way about things." "About _some_ things," corrected Sally. "Mebbe about all, sooner or later," said Mrs. Brown, in hopeful prediction. "He ain't a man to give up easy when he sets his mind in a certain direction." "Perhaps his nephew isn't, either," suggested her daughter, with a little tinge of color deepening in each cheek. "No, an' that's just the cause an' upshot of the whole trouble!" cried the mother, in a sudden flash of vehemence, dropping the persuasive tones she had heretofore employed for resentful chiding. "His nephew's at the bottom of it all, an' you seem ready an' willin' to throw away a good chance of a nice, comfortable home an' deprive me of a shelter in my old age just for the sake of that no-account Milt Derr, who happens to have smooth ways an' a nimble tongue. It looks like he's fairly bewitched you."