“An’ I’d been hankerin’ arter them carrots ever since breakfast,” she whimpered.

“Don’t cry, ma, I’ll mash you up some nice ones for supper.  That’ll be something to look forward to,” said Sarah, who might have won an immortal crown had such trophies been awarded to the patience of daughters-in-law.  “So you didn’t buy that steer, Abel?”

“No, I didn’t buy it.”

“Have you seen Judy to-day?”

“I stopped there on my way home.  She was making butter, and we talked about buying an extra cow or two and letting Blossom and her send some to market.”

“Well it beats me!” observed Sarah, but whether her discomfiture was due to Judy’s butter or to Abel’s love making, she did not explain.  On the whole the staidness of the courtship was pleasing to her.  Her sense of decorum was flattered by it, for she had as little tolerance of the softer virtues as of the softer vines.  It had been years since she had felt so indulgent toward her second son; yet in spite of the gratification his dejection afforded her, she was, as she had just confessed, utterly and entirely “beat.”  His period of common sense—­of perfect and complete sobriety—­had lasted for half a year, but she was too shrewd a woman to be deceived by the mere external calmness of appearances.  She had had moreover, a long experience with males of the Revercomb stock, and she knew that it was when their blood flowed quietest that there was the greatest danger of an ultimate “rousing.”  All her life she had lived in dread of this menace to respectability—­to that strict observance of the letter of the social law for which the Hawtreys had stood for generations.  On several occasions she had seen a Revercomb really “roused,” and when the transformation was once achieved, not all the gravity of all the Hawtreys could withstand the force of it.  And this terrible potential energy in her husband’s stock would assert itself, she knew, after a period of tranquillity.  She hadn’t been married to a Revercomb for nothing, she had once remarked.

If anything could have put her into a cheerful humour, it would have been the depressed and solemn manner with which Abel went about the preparations for his marriage.  The inflexible logic of Calvinism had passed into her fibre, until it had become almost an instinct with her to tread softly in the way of pleasure lest God should hear.  Generations of joyless ancestors had imbued her with an ineradicable suspicion of human happiness—­as something which must be paid for, either literally in its pound of flesh, or in a corresponding measure of the materials of salvation.

“I declar’ things are goin’ on so smooth that something must be gettin’ ready to happen,” she said anxiously to herself at least twenty times a day—­for she had observed life, and in her opinion, the observation had verified the rigid principles of her religion.  Do what you would the doctrines of original sin and predestination kept cropping up under the surface of existence.  And so—­“It looks all right on top, but you never can tell,” was the habitual attitude of her mind.