"God bless you, Joe! Oh, you have lifted such a weight from my heart! I don't know how to thank you; but Joe, we'll pay it all back to you! We will, if it takes the place to do it!" Joe, freeing his hand from her clasp, rose to his feet--not stiffly, this time, but with a certain grave dignity. Motioning aside the coffee that I was bringing, he picked his ragged old hat up from the floor beside his chair, put it on, pulled it down over his eyes, and started for the door. "'Fore Heaben! I wouldn't 'a' beliebed dat one ob Mas'r Ralph Gordon's chillen gwine fur insult me like dis!" he muttered, huskily; "Talk ob payin' me! Me, like I was a stranger, an' didn' belong to de fambly!" "Wait!" cried Jessie, springing forward, as the old man laid a trembling hand on the door knob. "Wait, sit down, Joe, dear Joe, don't desert us when we need you most! As for the money, God bless you for making sure of our home, for, of course, it's your home, too, always, always! And I'll never pay a cent of the money back; not if I use it all!" "Yo's gwine hab to use hit all, honey," Joe returned, with a beaming face, as he resumed his seat. "Dere's de fence buildin' an' breakin' de new groun', and de seedin'." "True enough! Oh, we shall come out all right, now, thanks to you, Joe." And Jessie spoke with the happy little laugh that we had not heard for a long, long time. CHAPTER XXII AN OPEN WINDOW It was, apart from the pecuniary relief that his coming had brought us, a great satisfaction to have old Joe again with us. Remembering his habit of not speaking until he was, as he sometimes expressed it, "plumb ready," we forbore to ask any more questions until he had finished his supper, and smoked his pipe afterward. Smoking is a bad habit, I know, but I am afraid that there are few good habits from which people derive more comfort than fell to Joe when he was puffing contentedly away at his old clay pipe. After a long interval of blissful enjoyment he knocked the ashes out of his pipe, pocketed it, and then remarked, rather wistfully, apparently to the fire as much as to either of us: "I reckons he's fas' asleep, shore' nuff!" "He" meant Ralph, of course. "Yes," Jessie said, "he's been asleep ever since a little while before dark." "Yo' reckons hit gwine fur 'sturb him, jess fur me ter tek' a look at him, honey?"