“I’ve been a _lickin’_ Bill Carter, and I’ll do it again if he ever tells such stuff about you! Why, he said you’re a going to get married to that ill-begotten, shoulder-shotten snap-dragon of a Miss Dutton! I told him ’twas the biggest lie, and then he said it wasn’t, that it was true, and she was coming here to be our step-mother; that she would cut off ’Tish’s curls, spank Ben and Burt twice a day, shake Daisy into shoe-strings, and make Jim and me toe the mark,—the hateful!” “She ain’t, she shan’t,—old nasty Dutton,” and fiery Ben shook his tiny fist at an imaginary bugbear who was to spank him twice a day. Jessie laughed aloud. Bell looked amused, Dora disturbed, and the Squire very red, as he said to his son: “You should not mind such gossip, or allow yourself to get into a passion. Time enough to rebel when the step-mother comes. Now go to your room and bathe your eye.” Johnnie obeyed, muttering as he went: “There’s only one person I’d have for a step-mother any how, and that’s Aunt Dora. Guy, wouldn’t I raise hob with anybody else!” “John, leave instantly!” the Squire said sternly, while his face colored crimson, as did Dora’s also, making Bell and Jessie glance curiously at each other, as both thought of the same thing. In their own room, after dinner, they discussed together the possibility of Dora’s becoming what Johnnie wished her to be, Bell scouting the idea as preposterous, and Jessie insisting that a girl might love Squire Russell well enough to take him with all his children. “Not that I think Dora will do so,” she said, “for I fancy he is not as much to her taste, even, as he is to mine; and I guess I’d jump in the creek sooner than marry an old widower with half a dozen children.” What the two sisters were discussing privately in their room was talked openly in the village, some of the people arguing that Dora could not do better, while all agreed that for the Squire it would be a match every way desirable both for his own and his children’s sake. To the Squire himself the story was told one day, the teller hinting that the matter was entirely settled, and asking when the marriage would take place. With some jocose reply, the Squire rode away, going round to Margaret’s grave, and thence back to his home, where the evening lights were shining, and where Dora, with Daisy in her arms, sat alone in the back parlor, Bell and Jessie having accepted an invitation which she was obliged to decline on account of a bad headache. There were strange thoughts stirring in the Squire’s breast that night, thoughts which had haunted him for weeks and months, aye, since Margaret died, for he could not forget her words. “You need not wait long. You and Dora are above people’s gossip, and it will be so much better for the children.” This was what Margaret had said to him that night when misapprehending her sister just as she was misapprehended, she had told him: “I have talked with Dora, and she has promised to take my place.”