Toward sunset I laid away my dead book, and went down to the sitting-room where Mrs. Hopper sat placidly mending.  She looked a trifle anxiously at my reddened eyelids.  “Feel well?” she queried, plying the needle swiftly.  “You mustn’t let things prey onto your mind,” she admonished, “or you won’t get your money’s worth of good out of the place, and besides, Lord! what is there worth worryin’ over, any how?  Money ain’t worth it, and love ain’t worth it,” she declared, with a keen glance at me.  “But, there, what is the use of tellin anybody that?  I worried some before I married Pa.  I guess it’s natural.  I thought, thinks I, ’Mary Ann Bishop, he’s years older’n you, ‘n’ he’s weakly, ‘n’ there ain’t much doubt but what you’ll be left a relic’.  Now look, that was ten years ago, and Pa ain’t no more out o’ slew ‘n’ he was then.  ‘N’ then I thought, ‘There, he’s had one wife.’ (Pa was a widower.) ‘’N’ I expect he’ll be always a-comparin’ of us.’  It ain’t happened once, at least, not out loud, an’ oh! how good he was to that woman!  It didn’t seem as if he could be as good to his second.  It was all over the place,” said Mrs. Hopper laying down “Pa’s” calico shirt, and speaking in low and impressive tones, as befits the subject of death, “how he bought her a bran-new wig two weeks before she died, an’ he let her be buried in that wig, that cost over thirty dollars!  An’ as for a stone!  Well, there, he went over to Gilsey’s marble-yard to New Sidon, ‘n’ picked out a sixty-dollar tomb, ‘n’ never asked ’m to heave off a cent!  An’ that man, Miss Marriott,” said Mrs. Hopper, “he’d do just as well by me as ever he done by her, ‘n’ I’m contented, ‘n’ I’m happy.  I can tell you, I’m a believer in marriage,” she said, with a proud smile, as she rose to get tea.

Mr. Longworth brought over a neat package of manuscript that evening, which I sent, with a letter to Mr. ——.  We sat talking on the porch, watching the moon rise and flood the dew-wet fields with a tide of white radiance.  Occasionally we heard Mr. or Mrs. Hopper in the lamp-lit sitting-room making brief comments on neighborhood gossip, or the crops, and then Mrs. Hopper would go on silently sewing, and “Pa,” his white head bent over a “Farmer’s Almanac,” made long and painful calculations on a scrap of paper in which he seemed to get much mysterious assistance from the almanac.

Without, the cool night air touched my face gently.  My head was burning and fevered with the day’s emotions, but I felt the infinite peace of the evening calming me.

“No,” I said firmly, “indeed I have decided wisely, Mr. Longworth.  I am going back to my old work cheerfully, and shall never think again of my—­my disappointment.  I believe I can easily get work on my old paper, the “Courier,” and I have been offered an editorial position on a new fashion paper, beside my weekly letter to the “Red Canon Gazette.’” Naturally I did not tell him that I had spent all my savings of a year on this planned vacation, when I was to finish the book that should reimburse me.