"Right you are!" she said. "I never go without it." Then to Mrs. Gano: "_My!_ I'm awful fawnd of my paw. P'raps you'd like to see him." Miss Fox obligingly unfastened the frying-pan, and shied it, quoit-like, down the table to her hostess. There was a pause, a hideous silence. "Pass me the crackers, Venus," Mrs. Gano said, presently, to Aunt Jerusha's daughter. As she took the plate she, without touching it, indicated the big bold locket. "Take that to Miss Fox," she said. And while the maid was conveying the visitor's property back to her in the middle of a large tray, Mrs. Gano had turned to Valeria and was speaking of the morning's sermon. Poor Miss Hattie put the finishing touch to her visit by departing without taking leave of her hostess. "Won't you come to the parlor a moment and say good-bye to my mother?" said John, when Valeria brought their guest down-stairs into the hall, hatted and gloved, and ready to go home. "Gracious Peter! say good-bye?" The guest drew back in genuine alarm. "You may just bet I won't say 'beans' before her from now till Gabriel blows his trumpet in the morning. Did you hear the last thing she said to me? _My!_" "No; I was playing 'Dixie Land.'" "Yes; and all through it she kept looking at the clock, and when you got to the loud part she leaned over and asked me whether I expected my father or a servant to come for me? My _gracious_!" "Oh, but I--I--" stammered John. "You--_you_? Not a bit of it. She said Jerusha should see me to my door. The old hag's out at the gate now waiting for me. Oh _my_!" And Miss Fox fled the premises. No word ever passed between mother and son about the young lady. It was wholly unnecessary to discuss her. John had been made to see, in a ruthless light, the unseemliness of asking this raw little Westerner to be his mother's successor in the house of Gano, even in these degenerate days. John's disappointment had no tragic issue, yet, in spite of the consolation of other friends, in spite of the joys of experimental science in the freedom of the woodshed, he was grievously unhappy for a time, especially on Saturday evenings, which he had been used to spend at the Foxes'. Partly in order to have an excuse for breaking through that custom, and partly for a belated doctrinal reason, he occupied his Saturday evenings in taking Hebrew lessons from the Principal of the Boys' Academy. Young Gano had the inquirer's temper, and if he had not had his bread to win, he would probably have been a traveller along many of the roads of learning.