Richard had no idea that Melinda was managing him, or that anyone was managing him.  He thought himself that Camden might be a pleasant place to live; as an ex-Judge and M.C. he could get business anywhere; and though he preferred Olney, inasmuch as it was home, he would, if Ethelyn liked, try Camden for a while.  It is true the price of the rooms, which Melinda casually named, was enormous, but, then, Ethelyn’s health and happiness were above any moneyed consideration; and so, while Mrs. Markham below made and molded the soda biscuit, and talked about dreading the hot weather if “Ethelyn was going to be weakly,” Aunt Barbara, and Melinda, and Richard settled a matter which made her eyes open wide with astonishment when, after the exit of the Joneses and the doing up of her work, it was revealed to her.  Of course, she charged it all to Aunt Barbara, wishing that good woman as many miles away as intervened between Olney and Chicopee.  Had the young people been going to keep house, she would have been more reconciled, for in that case much of what they consumed would have been the product of the farm; but to board, to take rooms at the Stafford House where Ethelyn would have nothing in the world to do but to dress and gossip, was abominable.  Then when she heard of the price she opposed the plan with so much energy that, but for Aunt Barbara and Melinda Jones, Richard might have succumbed; but the majority ruled, and Ethelyn’s eyes grew brighter, and her thin cheeks rounder, with the sure hope of leaving a place where she had been so unhappy.  She should miss Melinda Jones; and though she would be near Mrs. Miller, and Marcia Fenton, and Ella Backus, they could not be to her all Melinda had been, while Andy—­Ethelyn felt the lumps rising in her throat whenever she thought of him and the burst of tears with which he had heard that she was going away.

“I can’t help thinkin’ it’s for the wuss,” he said, wiping his smooth face with the cuff of his coat-sleeve.  “Something will happen as the result of your goin’ there.  I feel it in my bones.”

Were Andy’s words prophetic?  Would something happen, if they went to Camden, which would not have happened had they remained in Olney?  Ethelyn did not ask herself the question.  She was too supremely happy, and if she thought at all, it was of how she could best accelerate her departure from the lonely farmhouse.

When Mrs. Markham found that they were really going, that nothing she could say would be of any avail, she gave up the contest, and, mother-like, set herself at work planning for their comfort, or rather for Richard’s comfort.  It was for him that the best and newest featherbed, weighing thirty pounds and a half to a feather, was aired and sunned three days upon the kitchen roof, the good woman little dreaming that if the thirty-pounder was used at all, it would do duty under the hair mattress Ethelyn meant to have.  They were to furnish their own rooms, and whatever expense Mrs. Markham could save her boy