“Just raise the cover of the bucket and let him get a whiff,” answered Mr. Crabtree, shaking with amusement. “’Tain’t no use to offer a man no kind of young lollypop when he have got his mouth fixed on a nice old-fashioned pound-cake woman,” he added in a ruthful tone of voice as he and Rose Mary both laughed over the trying plight in which he found his misguided love affairs.  “There comes that curly apple puff now.  Howdy, Louisa Helen; come across the plank and I’ll give you this chair if I have to.”

“I don’t wanter make you creak your joints,” answered Louisa Helen with a pert little toss of her curly head as she passed him and stood by Rose Mary’s table.  “Miss Rose Mary, I wanter to show you this Sunday waist I’ve done made Maw and get you to persuade her some about it for me.  I put this little white ruffle in the neck and sleeves and a bunch of it down here under her chin, and now she says I’ve got to take it right off.  Paw’s been dead five years, and I’ve most forgot how he looked.  Oughtn’t she let it stay?”

“I think it looks lovely,” answered Rose Mary, eying the waist with enthusiasm.  “I’ll come down to see your mother and beg her to let it stay as soon as I get the butter worked.  Didn’t she look sweet with that piece of purple lilac I put in her hair the other night?  Did she let that stay?”

“Yes, she did until Mr. Crabtree noticed it, and then she threw it away.  Wasn’t he silly?” asked Louisa Helen with a teasing giggle at the blushing bachelor.

“It shure was foolish of me to say one word,” he admitted with a laugh.  “But I tell you girls what I’ll do if you back Mis’ Plunkett into that plum pretty garment with its white tags.  I’ll go over to Boliver and bring you both two pounds of mixed peppermint and chocolate candy with a ribbon tied around both boxes, and maybe some pretty strings of beads, too.  Is it a bargain?” And Rose Mary smiled appreciatively as Louisa Helen gave an eager assent.

At this juncture a team driven down the Road had stopped in front of the store, and from under the wide straw hat young Bob Nickols’ eager eyes lighted on Louisa Helen’s white sunbonnet which was being flirted partly in and partly out of the milk-house door.  As he threw down the reins he gave a low, sweet quail whistle, and Louisa Helen’s response was given in one liquid note of accord.

“Lands alive, it woulder been drinking harm tea to try to whistle a woman down in my day, but now they come a-running,” remarked Mr. Crabtree to Rose Mary, as he prepared to take his departure in the wake of the pink petticoats that had hurried across the street.