Judge Fulsom arose, brushed the tobacco from his waistcoat front and cleared his throat.

“Guess I’ll have to be getting along,” said he; “important papers to look over, and—­”

“A female woman, like her, is likely to change her mind before tomorrow morning,” said the middle-aged man dubiously.  “And I heard Mrs. Solomon Black had offered to sell her place to the young woman for twenty-nine hundred—­all in good repair and neat as wax.  She might take it into her head to buy it.”

“Right in the village, too,” growled Lute Parsons.  “Say, Jedge, did you give her that option she was looking for?  Because if you did she can’t get out of it so easy.”

Judge Fulsom twinkled pleasantly over his bulging cheeks.

“I sure did accommodate the young lady with the option, as aforesaid,” he vouchsafed.  “And what’s more, I telephoned to the Grenoble Bank to see if her check for five thousand dollars was O. K....  Well; so long, boys!”

He stepped ponderously down from the piazza and turned his broad back on the row of excited faces.

“Hold on, Jedge!” the middle-aged man called after him.  “Was her check any good?  You didn’t tell us!”

The Judge did not reply.  He merely waved his hand.

“He’s going over to the post office,” surmised the lean youth, shifting the stub of his cigar to the corner of his mouth in a knowing manner.

He lowered his heels to the floor with a thud and prepared to follow.  Five minutes later the bartender, not hearing the familiar hum of voices from the piazza, thrust his head out of the door.

“Say!” he called out to the hatchet-faced woman who was writing down sundry items in a ledger at a high desk.  “The boys has all cleared out.  What’s up, I wonder?”

“They’ll be back,” said the woman imperturbably, “an’ more with ’em.  You want t’ git your glasses all washed up, Gus; an’ you may as well fetch up another demijohn out the cellar.”

Was it foreknowledge, or merely coincidence which at this same hour led Mrs. Solomon Black, frugally inspecting her supplies for tomorrow morning’s breakfast, to discover that her baking-powder can was empty?

“I’ll have to roll out a few biscuits for their breakfast,” she decided, “or else I’ll run short of bread for dinner.”

Her two boarders, Lydia Orr and the minister, were sitting on the piazza, engaged in what appeared to be a most interesting conversation, when Mrs. Black unlatched the front gate and emerged upon the street, her second-best hat carefully disposed upon her water-waves.

“I won’t be gone a minute,” she paused to assure them; “I just got to step down to the grocery.”

A sudden hush fell upon a loud and excited conversation when Mrs. Solomon Black, very erect as to her spinal column and noticeably composed and dignified in her manner, entered Henry Daggett’s store.  She walked straight past the group of men who stood about the door to the counter, where Mr. Daggett was wrapping in brown paper two large dill pickles dripping sourness for a small girl with straw-colored pig-tails.