"Lindsay hain't no trouble to wait on nuther: he's jest as tidy as a womern," he remarked, "and that's one reason I got him to come. I want to spar' the girls all I can." "You are right, Brother James," commended the bride, dimpling seductively, "they're so good to you! You are surely to be congratulated for having two such good daughters to care for you." "Thar hain't no danger o' me a losin' 'em, nuther." Mr. James' tone was confident. "I've allus been mighty good to 'em, and I've paid 'em fer teckin' keer o' me!" Miss Lucy looked up from the sock she was knitting,--one of a dozen pairs she had knit to pay for her winter hat. "Why, Pa," she protested mildly, "I've never saw any of the money you ever give anybody for takin' care of you!" "Money fer takin' keer o' me?" cried the old man in a tone of surprise: "I've been a feedin' you I reckon, and a feedin' you a mighty long time too!" When the minister and his wife were safely upstairs in their room, her clear, low laugh filled the little apartment. "I don't mean to be disrespectful," she cried out softly, "but Glen, I'm worried about the pay those two women received for their trouble in getting up that delicious supper!" "The pay?" The Reverend Avery's puzzled face sent his helpmeet off in another gurgle of laughter. "Their food, Stupid," she railed softly, "what a high estimate our brother must put on his '_feed_!'" "That isn't what's troubling me," responded the young man in mock trepidation: "I'm worried lest when we are in a house of our own, I shan't be able to come up to Miss Nancy's wood-box standard!" Miss Lucy crept cautiously to her bedroom on the ground floor, lighted only by the moon. In the kitchen Miss Nancy took down the papers she had hung the day before on the wall nails on which to hang her skillets and pans, and replaced them with fresh papers, and laid the morning's sticks in the stove by the light of the only lamp she would permit to be lighted beside the one in the guest-chamber. Miss Lucy pressed her face against the window and looked serenely out in the moonlit yard. "Them two are so happy together," she said to herself as a sound of laughter came to her ears, "I wish--" A shade of regret saddened her face for an instant. "But a body has always got somethin' to be glad over," she mused: "there's havin' _them_, such pleasant company, here tonight, and Pa and Nancy so agreeable, and--and Mr. Lindsay a comin' to stay with us a Saturday." The sudden warmth that came into her heart brought a faint heat to her cheeks. She remembered something Mr. Lindsay had said to her when he sat beside her in her buggy on the way to Callie Brock's burial, in the last month of the summer. On that occasion, he had no way to go and some one had pointed out to him a vacant seat in Miss Lucy's buggy.