“But thee don’t believe him, Jim?  Thee knows better.  Thee knows,” adding this with the sweet and sincere but often sadly mistaken humility of love—­“thee knows thou art better than me.  Thou art so grand and so noble!  If folks only knew thee better they would wonder at thee fur puttin’ up wi’ me.  I wish I could make thee a better wife.  But, Jim, if I ain’t very strong, I’m pretty good at contrivin’, an’ I don’t believe but what I can manage so’s to git along a’most as well as them that’s tougher.”

“Git along?  O’ course thee’ll git along,” answered Jim patronizingly.  “I telled mother th’other day that I didn’t cafe ef thee wa’n’t ’s strong as Mary Allen:  thee was a good deal smarter, an’ I’d be willin’ tu resk but what I’d hev as little waitin’ on ter dew fur thee ’s fur her.  Besides”—­and here a gleam of real if shallow affection sprang from Jim’s eyes as he looked down at the loving creature by his side—­“besides, I’d like to take care o’ thee, Sairy—­I would indeed.”

It is said that the sky has no color of its own—­that the deep blue we think so beautiful is only owing to the atmosphere through which we view it.  To Sarah this very slight expression of her lover’s care for her bore more weight than the most passionate protestations of affection could have done to a colder nature, for it was colored by the glowing tints of her own warm love; and when the two parted that day she carried with her a sweet, satisfying sense of being beloved by the “best man on the earth” even as she loved him; while he whistled cheerily over his net-mending, thinking “what a sweet little thing it was!” “how pretty its eyes were!” and “how kitten-like its ways!” and only checked his whistling once in a while to wonder whether the day would ever really come when “Sairy would feel herself better than him,” and to think it also a little hard that old Thomas Macy was “so sot agin’ the match” that he would give his daughter no portion but an outfit of clothes and household linen.  “He might jest’s well’s not,” reasoned Jim to himself, “give us a little lift:  I guess he would if Sairy’s own mother was alive; but them step-mothers never wants to give nothin’ ter the fust wives’ childern.”  In which opinion Jim did the second Mrs. Macy much injustice, for it was owing solely to her influence that Sarah’s father had consented to provide his daughter with even a new dress in which to be married to “that big, lazy boy o’old Steve Starbuck’s.”

Meantime, sad, gentle old Mrs. Starbuck had been turning over many things in her mind.  She felt her son’s defects; she knew that warm-hearted, imaginative Sarah Macy would be doing a foolish thing to marry Jim—­as foolish a thing as in her inmost heart she felt, rather than acknowledged, that she herself had done when she married Jim’s father.  But the mother-heart longed that her son should grow to be what she desired (and what poor Sarah thought he already was), and she hoped much from the elevating influence of so good a wife.