worn leaky boots when the snow was banked fence high?  Luther Warden’s boots never leak.  They are always tight and well tallowed.  His horses and his cows waddle in their fat, and the wool of his flocks is the longest in the valley.  Luther gets up with the sun and goes to bed with it.  Some in our valley think his heavy crops come from his six days of labor, and some from his one day of preaching.  He says that the one day does it all; but he keeps on getting out with the sun on the other six.  I knew that the poor girl from Kansas must get up with the sun, too, for her uncle was not the man to brook any dawdling.  I knew, further, that Sunday could not be a day of rest for her, for of all his people she would have to listen to his preaching.

That was why I murmured in a commiserative tone, “Luther’s niece—­poor girl!”

“You needn’t pity her,” Tim snapped.  “She knows a heap more about the world than you or I do.  She—­”

“She is not a Dunkard, then?” I interrupted.

“Not a bit,” Tim answered.  “I don’t know what she was in Kansas, but Luther has preached so much on worldliness and the vanity of fine clothes that it wouldn’t look right for his niece to go flaunting frills and furbelows about the valley.  That plain gray gown is a concession to the old man.  He’d like her to wear a prayer-cap and a poke bonnet, I guess, but she has a mind of her own.  I think she drew the line there.”

She had not given up so much, I thought.  Perhaps in her self-denial there was method, and her simple garb became her best.  Even a prayer-cap might frame her face the fairest; but she must know.  And I had seen that in the flash of her eye and the toss of her head that told me that a hundred Luther Wardens, a hundred Dunkard preacher uncles, could not abate her beauty one jot.

“She’s rich,” said Tim.

He blurted it out.  As long as I had seen her and found her beautiful, this announcement seemed uncalled for.  Had she been plain of face and figure it might have served a purpose, were my brother endeavoring to excuse the sentimental state of mind he had disclosed to me.  He knew that the place he held in my heart was first.  This had always been true, and in our lonely innocence we had promised it should be true to the end.  There was to be a fair return.  He had promised it, and now he was learning how hard it was to keep faith.  His attitude was one of half penitence, half defiance.  Had I not seen the girl, had he told me that she was beautiful, and even rich and good, all our boyish pledges would have been swept aside, and I should have cheered him on.  But I had seen her.  She had laughed with me.  Somehow we had understood each other.  And now I cared not so much what he felt for her as how she looked on him.  For once in our lives Tim and I were fencing.

“She’s pretty, Tim,” said I, “and rich, you say?”

“Mary has several thousand dollars,” he answered.  “Besides that, she’ll get all old man Warden has to leave, and that’s a pretty pile.”