Dinner was at noon on Thanksgiving Day, and the Monroes, sated and overwarm, were sitting about the fire when Rodney Parker and his friend, Alvah Brigham, came to take Martie and Sally walking.  The girls were sewing at the endless roses; but they jumped up in a flutter, and ran for hats and sweaters.  They did not exchange a word, nor lose a second, while they were upstairs, running down again immediately to end the uncomfortable silence that held the group about the fire.

It was a cold, bleak day, and the pure air was delicious to Martie’s hot cheeks after the close house.  She had immediately taken possession of Alvah; Sally and Rodney followed.  They took the old bridge road, which the girls loved for the memory of bygone days, when they had played at dolls’ housekeeping along the banks of the little Sonora, climbed the low oaks, and waded in the bright shallow water.  Even through to-day’s excitement Martie had time for a memory of those long-ago summer afternoons, and she said to herself with a vague touch of pain that it would of course be impossible to have with any man the serene communion of those days with Sally.

Mr. Brigham was a pale, rather fat young man with hair already thinning.  He did not have much to say, but he was always ready to laugh, and Martie saw that he had cause for laughter.  She rattled on recklessly, anxious only to avoid silence; hardly conscious of what she said.  The effect of the cool, fresh air was lost upon Martie to-day; she was fired to fever-pitch by Rodney’s nearness.

He had not ever said anything exactly loverlike, she said to herself, with a sort of breathless discontent, when she was setting the table for a cold supper that night.  But he had brought his friend to them after all!  She must not be exacting.  She had so much--

“I beg your pardon, Cousin Allie?” she stammered.  Her obnoxious relative, a stout, moustached woman of fifty, warming her skirts at the fire, was smiling at her unkindly.

“You always was a great one to moon, Martha!” said Mrs. Potts, “I’s asking you what you see in that young feller to make such a to-do about?”

“Then you don’t like him?” Martie countered, laughing.  Mrs. Potts bridled.  Her favourite attitude toward life was a bland but suspicious superiority; she liked to be taken seriously.

“I didn’t say I didn’t like him,” she answered, accurately, a little nettled.  “No, my dear, I didn’t say that.  No.  I wouldn’t say that of any young man!” she added thoughtfully.

Smiling a dark smile, she looked into the fire.  Martie, rather uncomfortable, went on with her task.

“He’s seemed to admire our Mart in a brotherly sort of way since the very beginning,” Lydia explained, anxious as usual to say the kind thing, and succeeding as usual in saying the one thing that could hurt and annoy.  “He’s quite a boy for the girls, but we think our Martie is too sensible to take him seriously, yet awhile!” And Lydia gave her sister a smile full of sweet significance.