“I should say so—­’of course, then’—­you got it.  But I didn’t get it for near an hour yet.  I set up to my bedroom window in the dark, waiting excitedly, and pretty soon they slowly floated up to the front gate, talking in hushed tones and gurgles.  ‘Male and female created He them,’ I says, flushed with triumph.  The moon wasn’t up yet, but you hadn’t any trouble making out they was such.  He was acting outrageously like a male and she was suffering it with the splendid courage which has long distinguished our helpless sex.  And there I set, warming my old heart in it and expanding like one of them little squeezed-up sponges you see in the drug-store window which swells up so astonishing when you put it in water.  I wasn’t impatient for them to quit, oh, no!  They seemed to clench and unclench and clench again, as if they had all the time in the world—­with me doing nothing but applaud silently.

“After spending about twenty years out there they loitered softly up the walk and round to the side door where I’d left the light burning, and I slipped over to the side window, which was also open, and looked down on the dim fond pair, and she finally opened the door softly and the light shone out.”

Again Ma Pettengill paused, her elbows on the arms of her chair, her shoulders forward, her gray old head low between them.  She drew a long breath and rumbled fiercely: 

“And the mushy fool me, forcing that herd of calves on old Dave at that scandalous price—­after all, that’s what really gaffed me the worst!  My stars!  If I could have seen that degenerate old crook again that night—­but of course a trade’s a trade, and I’d said it.  Ain’t I the old silly!”

“The door opened and the light shone out—­”

I gently prompted.

She erected herself in the chair, threw back her shoulders, and her wide mouth curved and lifted at the corners with the humour that never long deserts this woman.

“Yep!  That light flooded out its golden rays on the reprehensible person of C. Wilbur Todd,” she crisply announced.  “And like they say in the stories, little remains to be told.

“I let out a kind of strangled yell, and Wilbur beat it right across my new lawn, and I beat it downstairs.  But that girl was like a sleepwalker—­not to be talked to, I mean, like you could talk to persons.

“‘Aunty,’ she says in creepy tones, ’I have brought myself to the ultimate surrender.  I know the chains are about me, already I feel the shackles, but I glory in them.’  She kind of gasped and shivered in horrible delight.  ‘I’ve kissed the cross at last,’ she mutters.

“I was so weak I dropped into a chair and I just looked at her.  At first I couldn’t speak, then I saw it was no good speaking.  She was free, white, and twenty-one.  So I never let on.  I’ve had to take a jolt or two in my time.  I’ve learned how.  But finally I did manage to ask how about Chet Timmins.