“What they intend giving?”

“Yes.  And without they intend giving something worth while, she says she won’t invite ’em, and maybe we won’t have a big wedding at all,” she finished, pathetically.

Joe did not answer.  Esther stole an appealing glance at him.

“Does it seem a queer thing to do?”

“Well, yes, rather.”

Her face quivered.  “She said I’d done so much for Mis’ Lawrence—­”

“Well, you have, and I’ve wished a good many times that you wouldn’t.  I’m sure I never knuckled to her, though she is my great-aunt.”

“I never knuckled to her, either,” protested Esther.

“You’ve done a sight more for her than I would have done, fixin’ her dresses and things, and she with more money than anybody else in town.  But your mother ain’t going to call on everybody, is she?” he asked, anxiously.

“Of course she ain’t.  Only she said, if it was going to be in June—­but I don’t want it to be ever,” she added, covering her face.

“Oh, it’s all right,” said Joe, penitently.  He went over and put his arm around her.  Nevertheless, his eyes held a worried look.

Joe’s father had bound him out to a farmer by the name of Norton until his majority, when the sum of seven hundred dollars, all the little fortune the father had left, together with three hundred more from Norton, was to be turned over to him.  But Joe would not be twenty-one until October.  It was going to be difficult for him to arrange for the June wedding Esther desired.  He was very much in love, however, and presently he lifted his boyish cheek from her hair.

“I think I’ll take that cottage of Lanham’s; it’s the only vacant house in the village, and he’s promised to wait for the rent, so that confounded old Norton needn’t advance me a cent.”

Esther flushed.  “What do you suppose makes him act so?” she questioned, though she knew.

Joe blushed too.  “He don’t like it because I’m going to work in the factory when it opens.  But Mis’ Norton and Sarah have done everything for me,” he added, decidedly.

Up to the time of his engagement Joe had been in the habit of showing Sarah Norton an occasional brotherly attention, and he would have continued to do so had not Esther and Mrs. Robinson interfered—­Esther from girlish jealousy, and her mother because she did not approve of the family, she said.  She could not say she did not approve of Sarah, for there was not a more upright, self-respecting girl in the village.  But Sarah, because of her father’s miserliness, often went out for extra work when the neighbors needed help, and this was the real cause of Mrs. Robinson’s feeling.  Unconsciously she made the same distinction between Sarah Norton and Esther that some of the more ambitious of the village mothers made between their girls and her own daughter.  Then it was common talk that old Jim Norton, for obvious reasons, was displeased with Joe’s matrimonial plans, but Mrs. Robinson professed to believe that the wife and daughter were really the ones disappointed.  Now Esther began twisting a button of Joe’s coat.