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Abraham's mobile face clouded over. "Angy?" he faltered. "Yew don't mean that Angy " Silence again fell on the group, while every glance was fastened on Abraham. "See here," he flashed his faded blue eye, "Angy's got more sense than that!" No one answered, but there was a significant shrugging of shoulders and lifting of eyebrows. Abraham was distressed and concerned enough now.
No one moved to see them off. Abe looked everywhere yet nowhere at all. Not a word was spoken even when the carriage was heard rolling down the drive; but the sound of the wheels seemed to arouse Angy from her stupor of amazement; and presently Abraham became conscious of a touch, a touch sympathetic, tender and true, a touch all-understanding the touch of Angy's hand within his own.
He held the parcel close to his bosom, and went on, still praising Blossy, this innocent old gentleman, heedless of Angy's gentle tug at his coat-tail; while Blossy buried her absurdly lovely old face in the pink flush of a wild-rose spray, and the other old ladies stared from him to her, their faces growing hard and cold.
The husband and wife passed into the garden between borders of boxwood, beyond which nodded the heads of Angy's carefully tended, out-door "children" her roses, her snowballs, her sweet-smelling syringas, her wax-like bleeding-hearts, and her shrub of bridal-wreath. "Jest a minute," she murmured, as Abe would have hastened on to the gate.
"Wa'al," Abe with an equally deprecatory gesture indicated Angy's horsehair trunk in the far corner of the loft, "yew ain't no more foolisher, I guess, over yer old trash 'n me an' Angy be a-keepin' that air minin' stock of mine. One lot is wuth 'bout as much as t'other." Recovering the envelop that she had dropped, he squinted at the superscription.
Alas, Blossy's frequent tete-a-tetes with the amused but sometimes impatient Abraham started an exceedingly foolish suspicion. When, asked the sisters of one another, did Abe ever help any one, save Blossy, shell dried beans or pick over prunes? When had he ever been known to hold wool for Angy's winding? Not once since wooing-time, I warrant you.
Then the fire beneath his brows died out and a mist obscured his sight. "Gals," he asked humbly, "would yew ruther have a new 'beloved brother'?" For a space there was no answer. Aunt Nancy's head was bowed in her hands. Lazy Daisy was openly sobbing. Miss Ellie was twisting her fingers nervously in and out she unwound them to clutch at Angy's arm as if to hold her.
Angy's secret hope that Abe would change his mind and abandon the projected trip to the Beach remained unfulfilled, in spite of the fact that cold weather suddenly descended on the South Side, and the bay became first "scummed" over with ice, and then frozen so solid that all its usual craft disappeared, and the "scooters" took possession of the field.
It nearly drives me frantic. "Brother Abe, now tell me honestly: do you think he would make a good husband?" Abe cleared his throat. Blossy was in earnest. Blossy could not be laughed at. She was his friend, and Angy's friend; and she had come to him as to a brother for advice. He too had known Samuel as man to man, which was more than any of the sisters could say.
The old man whiffed the smell of the coffee, tempted, yet withheld by the thought of Angy's horror, and the horror of the twenty-nine sisters. "Cap'n Abe" Clarence Havens, No. 5, with a big iron spoon in his hand and a blue gingham apron tied around his bronzed neck, put him on his mettle, however "Cap'n Abe, I tell yew, we wouldn't have waked no other fellow of your age out of a sound sleep.
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