"I'm going down to get my breakfast, now," she said, authoritatively. "Let me see what you'll have done by the time I get back." The stairs were creaking again. Mrs. Sharpe did not hurry too much, and Mrs. Oleander, all panting, was back in her rocker when she re-entered the kitchen, trying very hard to look as though she had never left it. "And how's your patient to-day, Mrs. Sharpe?" she asked, as soon as she could properly get her wind. "Much the same," said Mrs. Sharpe, with brevity; "wants to starve herself to death, crying in spells, and making a time. Let me help you." This to Sally, who was scrambling to get half a dozen things at once on the table. Mrs. Sharpe came to the rescue with a practiced hand, and upon the entrance of old Peter, who had been out chaining up the dogs, the quartet immediately sat down to breakfast. After breakfast, the new nurse again made herself generally useful in the kitchen, helped Sally, who was inclined to give out at the knees, to "red up," washed dishes and swept the floor with a brisk celerity worthy of all praise. And then, it being wash-day, she whipped up her sleeves, displaying two lusty, round arms, and fell to with a will among the soiled linens and steaming soap-suds. "I may as well do something," she said, brusquely, in answer to Mrs. Oleander's very faint objections; "there's nothing to do upstairs, and she doesn't want me. She only calls me names." So Mrs. Susan Sharpe rubbed, and wrung, and soaped, and pounded, and boiled, and blued for three mortal hours, and then there was a huge basket of clothes all ready to go on the line. "Now, ma'am," said this priceless treasure, "if you'll just show me the clothes-line, I'll hang these here out." Mrs. Oleander pointed to two long ropes strung at the lower end of the back yard, and Susan Sharpe, hoisting the basket, set off at once to hang them to dry. The two old women watched her from the window with admiring eyes. "She's a noble worker!" at last said old Sally. "She 'minds me of the time when I was a young girl myself. Dearie me! It went to my heart to see her rubbing them sheets and things as if they were nothing." "And I think she's to be trusted, too," said Mrs. Oleander. "She talks as sharp to that girl as you or I, Sally. I shouldn't mind if we had her here for good." Meantime, the object of all this commendation had marched across the yard, and proceeded scientifically to hang the garments on the line. But all the while the keen eyes inside the green spectacles went roving about, and alighted presently on something that rewarded her for her hard day's work. It was a man emerging from the pine woods, and crossing the waste strip of marshland that extended to the farm. A high board fence separated the back yard from this waste land, and but few ever came that way.