Only once did Mrs. Elliott say anything unpleasant, and the village, knowing her usually sharp tongue, thought she did remarkably well, and took but little stock in this particular speech. "I'm glad it's Sally Fred picked out, an' not one of the other girls," she declared; "she's twenty-nine years old now--a good, sensible age--pleasant an' easy-goin', same's her mother is, an' yet real capable. Ruth always was a silly, incompetent little thing--she has to hire help most of the time, with nothin' in the world to do but cook for Frank, look after that little tiny house, take care of them two babies, an' go into the store off an' on when business is rushin'. Molly's head is full of nothin' but music, an' Katherine's of books. As to that pretty little fool, Edith, I'm glad she ain't my daughter, runnin' round all the time with that Dutch boy, an' her parents both so possessed with the idea that she ain't out of her cradle yet--she bein' the youngest--that they can't see it. Peter ain't the only one she keeps company with either--if he was, it wouldn't be so bad, for I guess he's a good enough boy, though I can't understand a mortal word he says, an' them foreigners all have a kinder vacant look, to me. But the other night I was took awful sudden with one of them horrible attacks of indigestion I'm subject to--we'd had rhubarb pie for supper, an' 'twas just elegant, but I guess I ate too much of it, an' the telephone wouldn't work on account of the thunderstorm we'd had that day--seems like that there'd been a lot of them this season--so Joe had to hitch up an' go for the doctor. As he went past the cemetery, he see Edith leanin' over the fence with that no-count Jack Weston--an' it was past midnight, too!" In the midst of such general satisfaction, it was perhaps inevitable that at least one person should not be pleased. And that person, as will be readily guessed, was Thomas. Sylvia, thinking the blow might fall more bearably from his brother's hand than from hers, relegated the task of writing him to Austin; and Austin, with a wicked twinkle in his eye, wrote him in this wise: DEAR THOMAS: