“He is, for a fact, and the license and the preacher with him. Now what I want to know, and what I ought to been consulted, Miss Infant, seeing how long I been here, is this--what’s you and me going to do afterward? Is it an interference?” “Enos,” said Infant, with a gasp, “this is _almost_ as sudden to me as it is to you. But considering Rilla’s firm character, do you think she would let any new person interfere with her established plans?” “No, I don’t,” replied Enos, grinning. Rilla was standing before the dresser in her room arrayed in her stiffest silk. She looked with composure upon her twin, who shut the bedroom door, and hurried up to embrace her. “It was the best boiling of soap I ever had,” said Rilla, warding the fading roses away from her silk. “Rilla dear, you might have told me what you meant to do this evening. But I am so glad! I couldn’t bear the thoughts of leaving you before, but now I can.” “I saw Truman Condit come into the yard with you,” said Rilla. “He’s grown fat. It must have agreed with him to go west.” “This has been a great rose day,” said her twin, undoing all traces of the day’s festival, and piling them carefully in a waste-basket where they could make no litter. “Won’t you let me kiss you, Rilla?” The acquiescent nip which Rilla gave Infant took up a world of forgiveness which Rilla never felt. “And do you think, dear,” Infant ventured, “we’ll ever wish we hadn’t? We’ve lived so long with each other. Truman Condit and Brother Sanderson are really strangers to our ways.” “I think,” replied Rilla, with decision, “that Brother Sanderson will never have a rose day while he lives on _my_ farm; and when I say it is soap-boiling day it will _be_ soap-boiling day, and Brother Sanderson will stir the soap.” KENTUCKY A KENTUCKY PRINCESS TIME, 1857 The perfection of summer noon, when acres of corn tassels seemed in a trance and the blueness of far-off hills suggested incense rising, was not without its effect on Miss Sally Vandewater as she rode toward General Poynton’s plantation. The turnpike, stretching its ash-colored ribbon across the greenness of the country, rang like a causeway of rock to the beat of horseshoes. From this plantation or from that, as hill or sweep of woodland revealed them, shone marble stones in family burial lots.