Country Neighbors

								

crack--this was old custom, too--that she might hear them farther. This
time she was sure she actually knew when he turned into the road. She
went back to the room and stood for a moment, her hand resting on the
table, looking at the orderly fire and then at the chair which seemed to
belong more to him than to her father. The cat got up from the lounge
where, as she knew perfectly well, she had to content herself when Cap'n
Oliver came, stretched, and walked over to the chair as if to assert her
ownership. She was gathering her muscles for the easy leap when Miss
Letty pounced upon her, gently yet with an involuntary decision.
"Don't you get up there, puss," she said jealously. "Do you think you've
got to have a share in everything that's goin'?"
Then she laughed at herself in a gentle shame, lifted puss into the seat
of desire, and stroked her ruffled dignity, and still laughing, in that
indulgent way, sat down to see the fire out before she went to bed.
The next day Miss Letty set about cleaning her house, the actual first
step toward leaving it; and suddenly, as she worked, at a moment she
could never identify, it came over her that things which had been hers
by such long usage that they were as unconsidered as her hand that
wrought upon them, were to be hers no more. Then, as she dusted and
rubbed, she stopped from time to time, to regard the rooms and their
furnishings musingly and wonder if she should remember every smallest
touch of their homely charm. She hoped she should at least remember.
All the week she did not see Cap'n Oliver. He was over at the Pinelands,
she understood, making his married sister a little visit, as he always
did in the fall of the year. If she thought it a little hard that he
should be away the last week her home was to wear its accustomed face,
she did not say so, even to herself. It seemed to her a poor habit to
wish for what was obviously not to be, and all by herself she set upon
the day for the sale of her goods and sent for the auctioneer to come.
An auction was a great event throughout the countryside. It ordinarily
happened in the spring, as if people had taken all winter to get used to
parting with their possessions; and then wagons of every sort came from
whatever region the county paper had reached, and families brought their
lunches in butter-boxes and went about scrutinizing the household gear
that was to come under the hammer, glad at last to know what the house
walls had really held; or they visited with their neighbors in little
groups. But this was a day of fall sunshine and drifting leaves. Miss
Letty, standing at an upper window looking out on her pear tree, the
leaves leathery brown, felt a twitching of the lips. She gazed farther
over her domain, and it seemed to her that it had never been so pleasant
before, so mellowed and softened by the last light of the year. She knew
there were neighbors in the yard below, and could not bring herself to