Country Neighbors

								

"You are a good girl, Amelia. You've always been a good girl. Run home,
child, now, and come to-morrow. Good-night."
Amelia, out in the path a moment afterwards, the tablecloth under her
arm, could hardly believe in what had surely happened to her. Old lady
Knowles had bent forward to her; her soft lips had touched Amelia's
cheek.

HIS FIRST WIFE

It seemed to Lydia Gale that from the moment she met Eben Jakes she
understood what fun it was to laugh. She and her mother and three
sisters lived together in a comfortable way, and Lydia, although she was
the youngest, had come to feel that she was declining into those middle
years when beauty wanes, and though the desire to charm may raise an
eager hand, no one will stay to look. She was a delicate blonde, and
when she began to recognize these bounds of life she faded a little into
a still neutrality that might soon have made an old woman of her. The
sisters were dark, wholesome wenches, known as trainers at the
gatherings they were always summoned to enliven; but Lydia seldom found
their mirth exhilarating. Only when Eben Jakes appeared at the door,
that spring twilight, a droll look peering from his blue eyes, and a
long forefinger smoothing out the smile from the two lines in his lean
cheeks, and asked, as if there were some richness of humor in the
supposition, "Anybody heard anything of anybody named Eunice Eliot round
here?" she found her own face creasing responsively. Eunice Eliot had
been her mother's maiden name, and it proved that she and Eben's mother
had been schoolmates. Eben's mother had died some years before; and now,
taking a little trip with his own horse and buggy to peddle essences and
see the country, he had included his mother's friend within the circle
of his wandering.
Mrs. Gale had a welcome ready for him and for the treasured
reminiscences of his mother's past, and the three older sisters trained
with him to their limit. Lydia sat by and listened, smiling all the
time. She thought Eben's long, lank, broad-shouldered figure very manly,
and it shocked her beyond speech to hear one of the trainers avow that,
for her part, she thought his thin, Yankee face, with its big features
and keen eyes, as homely as a hedge-fence. Lydia said nothing, but she
wondered what people could expect. She was a greedy novel-reader, and
she had shy thoughts of her own. It seemed to her that Eben, who also
had passed his first youth, must have been a great favorite in his day.
Every commonplace betrayal in those intimate talks with her mother
served to show her how good he had been, how simple and true. He had
taken care of his mother through a long illness, and then, after her
death, lived what must have been a dull life, but one still dutiful
toward established bonds, with old Betty, the "help" of many years. Now
Betty had died, and before beginning another chapter with some domestic
expedient, he had allowed himself this limited trip, to breathe another