“Who?”

“The young fellow that came with her, that day.”

“That whipper-snapper?”

Dr. Mulbridge assented by his silence.  “But I guess I was mistaken.  I guess he’s tried and missed it.  The field is ’clear, for all I can see.  And she’s made a failure in one way, and then you know a woman is in the humor to try it in another.  She wants a good excuse for giving up.  That’s what I think.”

“Well,” said his mother, “I presume you know what you’re about, Rufus!”

She took up the coffee-pot on the lid of which she had been keeping her hand, and went into the kitchen with it.  She removed the dishes, and left him sitting before the empty table-cloth.  When she came for that, he took hold of her hand, and looked up into her face, over which a scarcely discernible tremor passed.  “Well, mother?”

“It’s what I always knew I had got to come to, first or last.  And I suppose I ought to feel glad enough I did n’t have to come to it at first.”

“No!” said her son.  “I’m not a stripling any longer.”  He laughed, keeping his mother’s hand.

She freed it and taking up the table-cloth folded it lengthwise and then across, and laid it neatly away in the cupboard.  “I sha’n’t interfere with you, nor any woman that you bring here to be your wife.  I’ve had my day, and I’m not one of the old fools that think they’re going to have and to hold forever.  You’ve always been a good boy to me, and I guess you hain’t ever had to complain’ of your mother stan’in’ in your way.  I sha’n’t now.  But I did think”

She stopped and shut her lips firmly.  “Speak up, mother!” he cried.

“I guess I better not,” she answered, setting her chair back against the wall.

“I know what you mean.  You mean about my laughing at women that try to take men’s places in the world.  Well, I did laugh at them.  They’re ridiculous.  I don’t want to marry this girl because she’s a doctor.  That was the principal drawback, in my mind.  But it does n’t make any difference, and wouldn’t now, if she was a dozen doctors.”

His mother let down the leaves of the table, and pushed it against the wall, and he rose from the chair in which he was left sitting in the middle of the room.  “I presume,” she said, with her back toward him, as she straightened the table accurately against the mopboard, “that you can let me have the little house at Grant’s Corner.”

“Why, mother!” he cried.  “You don’t suppose I should ever let you be turned out of house and home?  You can stay here as long as you live.  But it has n’t come to that, yet.  I don’t know that she cares anything about me.  But there are chances, and there are signs.  The chances are that she won’t have the courage to take up her plan of life again, and that she’ll consider any other that’s pressed home upon her.  And I take it for a good sign that she’s sent that fellow adrift.  If her mind had n’t been set on some one else, she’d have taken him, in this broken-up state of hers.  Besides, she has formed the habit of doing what I say, and there’s a great deal in mere continuity of habit.  It will be easier for her to say yes than to say no; it would be very hard for her to say no.”