her lace cap had a pink bow on it. But she looked anxious and uncomfortable.

(“Oh,” she was saying to herself, “I do hope Mary’s out!)—Well, Alfred?” she said; but her voice was frightened.

The Captain stumped along in front of her into the parlor, and motioned her to a seat. “Mrs. North,” he said, his face red, his eye hard, “some jack-donkeys have been poking their noses (of course they’re females) into our affairs; and—”

“Oh, Alfred, isn’t it horrid in them?” said the old lady.

“Darn ’em!” said the Captain.

“It makes me mad!” cried Mrs. North; then her spirit wavered. “Mary is so foolish; she says she’ll—she’ll take me away from Old Chester. I laughed at first, it was so foolish. But when she said that—oh dear!”

“Well, but, my dear madam, say you won’t go. Ain’t you skipper?”

“No, I’m not,” she said, dolefully. “Mary brought me here, and she’ll take me away, if she thinks it best. Best for me, you know. Mary is a good daughter, Alfred. I don’t want you to think she isn’t. But she’s foolish. Unmarried women are apt to be foolish.”

The Captain thought of Gussie, and sighed. “Well,” he said, with the simple candor of the sea, “I guess there ain’t much difference in ’em, married or unmarried.”

“It’s the interference makes me mad,” Mrs. North declared, hotly.

“Damn the whole crew!” said the Captain; and the old lady laughed delightedly.

“Thank you, Alfred!”

“My daughter-in-law is crying her eyes out,” the Captain sighed.

“Tck!” said Mrs. North; “Alfred, you have no sense. Let her cry. It’s good for her!”

“Oh no,” said the Captain, shocked.

“You’re a perfect slave to her,” cried Mrs. North.

“No more than you are to your daughter,” Captain Price defended himself; and Mrs. North sighed.

“We are just real foolish, Alfred, to listen to ’em. As if we didn’t know what was good for us.”

“People have interfered with us a good deal, first and last,” the Captain said, grimly.

The faint color in Mrs. North’s cheeks suddenly deepened. “So they have,” she said.

The Captain shook his head in a discouraged way; he took his pipe out of his pocket and looked at it absent-mindedly. “I suppose I can stay at home, and let ’em get over it?”

“Stay at home? Why, you’d far better—”

“What?” said the Captain.

“Come oftener!” cried the old lady. “Let ’em get over it by getting used to it.”

Captain Price looked doubtful. “But how about your daughter?”

Mrs. North quailed. “I forgot Mary,” she admitted.

“I don’t bother you, coming to see you, do I?” the Captain said, anxiously.

“Why, Alfred, I love to see you. If our children would just let us alone!”

“First it was our parents,” said Captain Price. He frowned heavily. “According to other people, first we were too young to have sense; and now we’re too old.” He took out his worn old pouch, plugged some shag into his pipe, and struck a match under the mantel-piece. He sighed, with deep discouragement.

Mrs. North sighed too. Neither of them spoke for a moment; then the little old lady drew a quick breath and flashed a look at him; opened her lips; closed them with a snap; then regarded the toe of her slipper fixedly. The color flooded up to her soft white hair.

The Captain, staring hopelessly, suddenly blinked; then his honest red face slowly broadened into beaming astonishment and satisfaction. “Mrs. North—”

“Captain Price!” she parried, breathlessly.

“So long as our affectionate children have suggested it!”

“Suggested—what?”

“Let’s give ’em something to cry about!”

“Alfred!”

“Look here: we are two old fools; so they say, anyway. Let’s live up to their opinion. I’ll get a house for Cyrus and Gussie—and your girl can live with ’em, if she wants to!” The Captain’s bitterness showed then.

“She could live here,” murmured Mrs. North.

“What do you say?”

The little old lady laughed excitedly, and shook her head; the tears stood in her eyes.

“Do you want to leave Old Chester?” the Captain demanded.

“You know I don’t,” she said, sighing.

“She’d take you away to-morrow,” he threatened, “if she knew I had—I had—”

“She sha’n’t know it.”

“Well, then, we’ve got to get spliced to-morrow.”

“Oh, Alfred, no! I don’t believe Dr. Lavendar would—”

“I’ll have no dealings with Lavendar,” the Captain said, with sudden stiffness; “he’s like all the rest of ’em. I’ll get a license in Upper Chester, and we’ll go to some parson there.”

Mrs. North’s eyes snapped. “Oh, no, no!” she protested; but in another minute they were shaking hands on it.

“Cyrus and Gussie can go and live by themselves,” said the Captain, joyously, “and I’ll get that hold cleaned out; she’s kept the ports shut ever since she married Cyrus.”

“And I’ll make a cake! And I’ll take care of your clothes; you really are dreadfully shabby”; she turned him round to the light, and brushed off some ashes. The Captain beamed. “Poor Alfred! and there’s a button gone! that daughter-in-law of yours can’t sew any more than a cat (and she is a cat!). But I love to mend. Mary has saved me all that. She’s such a good daughter—poor Mary. But she’s unmarried, poor child.”

However, it was not to-morrow. It was two or three days later that Dr. Lavendar and Danny, jogging along behind Goliath under the buttonwoods on the road to Upper Chester, were somewhat inconvenienced by the dust of a buggy that crawled up and down the hills just a little ahead. The hood of this buggy was up, upon which fact—it being a May morning of rollicking wind and sunshine—Dr. Lavendar speculated to his companion: “Daniel, the man in that vehicle is either blind and deaf, or else he has something on his conscience; in either case he won’t mind our dust, so we’ll cut in ahead at the watering-trough. G’on, Goliath!”