kind of way, that Mrs. Markham felt more aggrieved than ever, and, for a good woman, who sometimes spoke in meeting, slammed the door considerably hard as she left the room and went back to her kitchen, where the table had been laid ever since Ethelyn took to eating upstairs.  So long as she ate with the family Mrs. Markham felt rather obliged to take her meals in the front room, but it made a deal more work, and she was glad to return to her olden ways once more.  Eunice was gone off on an errand, and so she felt at liberty to speak her mind freely to her boys as they gathered around the table.

“It is sheer ugliness,” she said, “which keeps her cooped up there to be waited on.  She is no more sick than the dog; but law, I couldn’t make Richard b’lieve it.”

“Mother, you surely did not go to Richard with complaints of his wife,” and James looked reproachfully across the table at his mother, who replied:  “I told him what I thought, for I wa’n’t going to have him miserable all the time thinking how sick she was, but I might as well have talked to the wind, for any good it did.  He even seemed putcherky, too.”

“I should be more than putcherky if you were to talk to me against my wife if I had one,” James retorted, thinking of Melinda and the way she sang that solo in the choir the day before.

It was a little strange that James and John and Andy all took Ethelyn’s part against their mother, and even against Richard, who they thought might have taken her with him.

“It would not have hurt her any more than fretting herself to death at home.  No, nor half so much; and she must feel like a cat in a strange garret there alone with them.”

It was John who said this—­quiet John, who talked so little, and annoyed Ethelyn so much by coming to the table in his blue frock, with his pants tucked in his boots and his curly hair standing every way.  Though very much afraid of his grand sister-in-law, he admired her beyond everything, and kept the slippers she brought him safely put away with a lock of Daisy’s hair and a letter written him by the young girl whose grave was close beside Daisy’s in the Olney cemetery.  John had had his romance and buried it with his heroine, since which time he had said but little to womankind, though never was there a truer heart than that which beat beneath the homespun frock Ethelyn so despised.  Richard had bidden him to be kind to Ethie, and John had said he would; and after that promise was given had the farmhouse been on fire the sturdy fellow would have periled life and limb to save her for Dick.  To James, too, Richard had spoken a word for Ethie, and to Andy also; so that there were left to her four champions in his absence—­for Eunice had had her charge, with promises of a new dress if faithful to her trust; and thus there was no one against poor Ethelyn saving the mother-in-law, who made that first dinner after Richard’s absence so uncomfortable that John left the table without touching the boiled