“I don’t want to be meddlesome, but ’pears to me if you’d spoke out your feelings to Dick, you’d said, ’Tell Melinda Jones I don’t want to see her, neither to-night nor any time.’  Mebby I’m mistaken, but honest, do you want to see Melinda?”

There was something so straightforward in his manner that, without being the least offended, Ethelyn replied: 

“No, I do not.  I am sure I should not like her if she at all resembles her brother^ that terrible Timothy.”

Andy did not know that there was anything so very terrible about Tim.  He liked him, because he gave him such nice chews of tobacco, and was always so ready to lend a helping hand in hog-killing time, or when a horse was sick; neither had he ever heard him called Timothy before, and the name sounded oddly, but he classed it with the fine ways of his new sister, who called him Anderson, though he so much wished she wouldn’t.  It sounded as if she did not like him; but he said nothing on that subject now—­he merely adhered to the Jones question, and without defending Tim, replied: 

“Gals are never much like their brothers, I reckon.  They are softer, and finer, and neater; leastways our Daisy was as different from us as different could be, and Melinda is different from Tim.  She’s been to Camden high-school, and has got a book that she talks French out of; and didn’t you ever see that piece she wrote about Mr. Baldwin’s boy, who fell from the top of the church when it was building, and was crushed to death?  It was printed, all in rhyme, in the Camden Sentinel, and Jim has a copy of it in his wallet, ’long with a lock of Melinda’s hair.  I tell you she’s a team.”

Andy was warming up with his subject, and finding Ethelyn a good listener, he continued: 

“I want you to like her, and I b’lieve you orter, for if it hadn’t been for her this room wouldn’t of been fixed up as ’tis.  Melinda coaxed mother to buy the carpet, and the curtings, and to put your bed in there.  Why, that was the meal room, where you be, and we used to keep beans there, too; but Melinda stuck to it till mother moved the chest and the bags, and then we got some paint, and me and the boys and Melinda painted, and worked, hopin’ all the time that you’d be pleased, as I guess you be.  We wanted to have you like us.”

And simple-hearted Andy drew near to Ethelyn, who was softened more by what he said than she could have been by her husband’s most urgent appeal.  The thought of the people to whom she had been so cold, and even rude, working and planning for her comfort, touched a very tender chord, and had Richard then proffered his request for her to go down, it is very possible she might have done so; but it was too late now, and after Andy left her she lay pondering what he had said and listening to the sound of voices which came up to her from the parlor directly beneath her room where James, and John, and Andy, and the mother, with Melinda, and Eunice, were talking to Richard,