After this, as we have said, Jethro was more than ever at the store—­or rather in that domestic domain behind it which Wetherell and Cynthia shared with Miss Millicent Skinner.  Moses Hatch was wont to ask Cynthia how her daddies were.  It was he who used to clear out the road to the little schoolhouse among the birches when the snow almost buried the little village, and on sparkling mornings after the storms his oxen would stop to breathe in front of the store, a cluster of laughing children clinging to the snow-plough and tumbling over good-natured Moses in their frolics.  Cynthia became a country girl, and grew long and lithe of limb, and weather-burnt, and acquired an endurance that spoke wonders for the life-giving air of Coniston.  But she was a serious child, and Wetherell and Jethro sometimes wondered whether she was ever a child at all.  When Eben Hatch fell from the lumber pile on the ice, it was she who bound the cut in his head; and when Tom Richardson unexpectedly embraced the schoolhouse stove, Cynthia, not Miss Rebecca Northcutt, took charge of the situation.

It was perhaps inevitable, with such a helpless father, that the girl should grow up with a sense of responsibility, being what she was.  Did William Wetherell go to Brampton, Cynthia examined his apparel, and he was marched shamefacedly back to his room to change; did he read too late at night, some unseen messenger summoned her out of her sleep, and he was packed off to bed.  Miss Millicent Skinner, too, was in a like mysterious way compelled to abdicate her high place in favor of Cynthia, and Wetherell was utterly unable to explain how this miracle was accomplished.  Not only did Millicent learn to cook, but Cynthia, at the age of fourteen, had taught her.  Some wit once suggested that the national arms of the United States should contain the emblem of crossed frying-pans, and Millicent was in this respect a true American.  When Wetherell began to suffer from her pies and doughnuts, the revolution took place—­without stampeding, or recriminations, or trouble of any kind.  One evening he discovered Cynthia, decked in an apron, bending over the stove, and Millicent looking on with an expression that was (for Millicent) benign.

This was to some extent explained, a few days later, when Wetherell found himself gazing across the counter at the motherly figure of Mrs. Moses Hatch, who held the well-deserved honor of being the best cook in Coniston.

“Hain’t had so much stomach trouble lately, Will?” she remarked.

“No,” he answered, surprised; “Cynthia is learning to cook.”

“Guess she is,” said Mrs. Moses.  “That gal is worth any seven grown-up women in town.  And she was four nights settin’ in my kitchen before I knowed what she was up to.”

“So you taught her, Amanda?

“I taught her some.  She callated that Milly was killin’ you, and I guess she was.”