Harriet saw; and she walked up and took the dagger by the handle and twisted it to the right and to the left and drove it in deeper and was glad.

“How do you like this dress, Anna?” she inquired with the sweetest solicitude.  “Ah, there is no one like a friend to bring you to your senses!  You were right.  I am too old to change, too old to dress, too old even to read:  thank you, Anna, as always.”

Many a wound of friendship heals, but the wounder and the wounded are never the same to each other afterward.  So that the two comrades were ill at ease and welcomed a diversion in the form of a visitor.  It happened to be the day of the week when Miss Anna received her supply of dairy products from the farm of Ambrose Webb.  He came round to the side entrance now with two shining tin buckets and two lustreless eyes.

The old maids stood on the edge of the porch with their arms wrapped around each other, and talked to him with nervous gayety.  He looked up with a face of dumb yearning at one and then at the other, almost impartially.

“Aren’t you well, Mr. Webb?” inquired Miss Anna, bending over toward him with a healing smile.

“Certainly I am well,” he replied resentfully.  “There is nothing the matter with me.  I am a sound man.”

“But you were certainly groaning,” insisted Miss Anna, “for I heard you; and you must have been groaning about something.”

He dropped his eyes, palpably crestfallen, and scraped the bricks with one foot.

Harriet nudged Miss Anna not to press the point and threw herself gallantly into the breach of silence.

“I am coming out to see you sometime, Mr. Webb,” she said threateningly; “I want to find out whether you are taking good care of my calf.  Is she growing?”

“Calves always grow till they stop,” said Ambrose, axiomatically.

“How high is she?”

He held his hand up over an imaginary back.

“Why, that is high!  When she stops growing, Anna, I am going to sell her, sell her by the pound.  She is my beef trust.  Now don’t forget, Mr. Webb, that I am coming out some day.”

“I’ll be there,” he said, and he gave her a peculiar look.

“You know, Anna,” said Harriet, when they were alone again, “that his wife treats him shamefully.  I have heard mother talking about it.  She says his wife is the kind of woman that fills a house as straw fills a barn:  you can see it through every crack.  That accounts for his heavy expression, and for his dull eyes, and for the groaning.  They say that most of the time he sits on the fences when it is clear, and goes into the stable when it rains.”

“Why, I’ll have to be kinder to him than ever,” said Miss Anna.  “But how do you happen to have a calf, Harriet?” she added, struck by the practical fact.

“It was the gift of my darling mother, my dear, the only present she has made me that I can remember.  It was an orphan, and you wouldn’t have it in your asylum, and my mother was in a peculiar mood, I suppose.  She amused herself with the idea of making me such a present.  But Anna, watch that calf, and see if thereby does not hang a tale.  I am sure, in some mysterious way, my destiny is bound up with it.  Calves do have destinies, don’t they, Anna?”