Like a great many other girls who are quite affectionate daughters, she neglected to make a confidante of her mother; and Mrs. Prency was therefore very much surprised, on entering the room after a short shopping-tour, to discover the two young women in utter silence, Eleanor looking greatly vexed and the new sewing-woman very much distressed about something.  The older lady endeavored to engage the couple in conversation.  After waiting a little while for the situation to make itself manifest, but getting only very short replies, she left the room and made an excuse to call her daughter after her.

“My dear child, what is the matter?  Doesn’t Jane know how to sew?”

“Yes,” said Eleanor, “I suppose so; but she knows how to talk, too, and she has done it so industriously and made me feel so uncomfortable that I have not had any opportunity to examine her sewing.”

“My daughter, what can she have said to annoy you so much?”

“Oh,” exclaimed Eleanor, savagely snatching to pieces a bit of delicate silk she held in her hand, “what every one else is talking about.  What does any one in this town have to talk about just now, I wonder, except Reynolds Bartram and the church?  Why is it that they all think it necessary to come and talk to me about it?  I am sure I am not specially interested in church work, and I don’t believe any one who has talked to me about it is, but I hear nothing else from morning till night when any visitor comes in.  I was congratulating myself that I had an excuse to-day, so that I need not see any one who might call, but that dreadful girl is worse than all the rest put together.  She seems to think, as her folks at home haven’t anything else to talk about, and as her father is so delighted at the ‘blessed change,’ as she expresses it, that has come over Bartram, that I should feel just as happy about it.”

“Well, daughter, don’t you?”

“No, mother, I don’t.  I suppose it’s perfectly dreadful in me to say so, but I don’t feel anything of the kind.  It’s just horrid; and I wish you and father would take me away for a little while, or else let me go off on a visit.  People talk as if Ray belonged entirely to me,—­as if I had something to do about it; and you know perfectly well I haven’t.”

“Well, dear, is that any reason why you should be jealous of poor Sam Kimper?”

“Jealous!” exclaimed Eleanor, her eyes flashing:  “he is the worst enemy I ever had.  I haven’t had so much annoyance and trouble in all my life as have come to me during the past two or three days through that wretched man.  I wish him almost any harm.  I even wish he had never gone to the penitentiary”

Mrs. Prency burst out laughing.  The young woman saw the blunder she had committed, and continued, quickly,—­

“I mean that I wish he had never got out again.  The idea of a fellow like that coming back to this town and talking and working on people’s sympathies in such a way as to carry intelligent people right off their feet!  Here you and father have been talking about him at the table almost every day for a long time!”