She did not take his arm from her neck this time—­he had a right to keep it there—­and she suffered the caress, feeling no greater inconvenience than that his big hand was very warm and pressed a little too hard sometimes upon her shoulders.  He spoke to her of the errand on which he had come, and the great, warm hand pressed more heavily as he said, “It seems to me all a dream that in a few days you will be my own Ethie, my wife, from whom I need not be parted”; and then he spoke of his mother and his three brothers, James, and John, and Anderson, or Andy, as he was called.  Each of these had sent kindly messages to Richard’s bride—­the mother saying she should be glad to have a daughter in her home, and the three brothers promising to love their new sister so much as to make “old Dick” jealous, if possible.

These messages “old Dick” delivered, but wisely refrained from telling how his mother feared he had not chosen wisely, that a young lady with Boston notions was not the wife to make a Western man very happy.  Neither did he tell her of an interview he had with Mrs. Jones, who had always evinced a motherly care over him since her daughter’s death, and to whom he had dutifully communicated the news of his intended marriage.  It was not what Mrs. Jones had expected.  She had watched Richard’s upward progress with all the pride of a mother-in-law, lamenting often to Mrs. Markham that poor Abigail could not have lived to share his greatness, and during the term of his judgeship, when he stayed mostly in Camden, the county seat, she had, on the occasion of her going to town with butter and eggs, and chickens, taken a mournful pleasure in perambulating the streets, and selecting the house where Abigail might, perhaps, have resided, and where she could have had her cup of young hyson after the fatigue of the day, instead of eating her dry lunch of cheese and fried cakes in the rather comfortless depot, while waiting for the train.  Richard’s long-continued bachelorhood had given her peculiar pleasure, inasmuch as it betokened a continual remembrance of her daughter; and as her youngest child, the blooming Melinda, who was as like the departed Abigail as sisters ever are to each other ripened into womanhood, and the grave Richard spoke oftener to her than to the other maidens of the prairie village, she began to speculate upon what might possibly be, and refused the loan of her brass kettle to the neighbor whose husband did not vote for Richard when he ran for member of Congress.  Melinda, too, had her little ambitions, her silent hopes and aspirations, and even her vague longings for a winter in Washington, As the Markham house and the Jones house were distant from each other only half a mile, she was a frequent visitor of Richard’s mother, always assisting when there was more work than usual on hand and on the occasion of Richard’s first going to Washington ironing his shirts and packing them herself in the square hair trunk which had called forth Ethelyn’s