"No spring or summer's beauty hath such grace, As I have seen in one autumnal face." For more than a half-hour old Milton James had limped up and down the gravelled drive that led through the grove of poplars in front of the lead-colored, one-and-a-half storied house that was his home, alternately watching the fat old bay mare and three cows that pulled at the fodder scattered in the pasture field over the fence, and the muddy road that ran across the foot of the avenue and disappeared over the hill beyond. "Lucy Ann beats ever'theng a stayin'," he muttered, irritably pulling at his sparse white beard; "jest now in sight, and hit nigh twelve o'clock!" The dark object at length resolved itself into an old-fashioned and much mud-bespattered buggy, drawn by the counterpart of the bay in the pasture, and driven by a woman in black. "Lucy Ann, don't drive ag'in the gate-post!" With a hand that slightly trembled, both from weakness and nervous irritability, the tall old man, leaning on his stick, his bald head shining in the December sun, held open the side gate of the yard, while his daughter, measuring the space between the white-washed gate posts with an anxious eye, drove cautiously in. To a person of fifty years, agility is ordinarily a stranger. Miss Lucy, carefully protecting her new black etamine dress skirt from the wheel, climbed slowly out of the buggy, and gathered up the numerous bundles from the floor of the vehicle. Then, while her father fumbled with the straps of the harness, she lingered for a moment, watching him. "Pa," she ventured in the apologetic manner of one who expects a rebuff, "spose'n you let _me_ help take out old Maud. I'm afraid you'll hurt your bad knee." "Naw, I won't," answered her father testily: "you'd better jest take them thar bundles in the house, and put on your ever' day clothes and holp Nancy about the dinner! Nancy's been a workin' hard all the time you've been a gaddin' about town." When Miss Lucy came out of the front bedroom into the sitting-room behind it, an imaginary speck of dust on a pane of glass in the door of the tall cherry "press" filled with gay-colored dishes, caught her eye. She rubbed the glass carefully with a corner of her apron, and catching up the little hearth-broom, stooped to brush up a microscopic cinder that had fallen from the grate on the green and red striped rag carpet. Her sister greeted her with a look of reproach. "Do you think, Lucy, I ain't done no cleanin' up while you was gone?" she asked.