“Well,” Mrs. Anderson would say, “it’s all one to me whether the world comes to an end or not.  I should like to live to see the day of judgment.  But I shan’t.  No affectionate mother can stand such treatment as I receive from my own daughter.  If Norman was only at home!”

It is proper to explain here that Norman was her son, in whom she took a great deal of comfort when he was away, and whom she would have utterly spoiled by indulgence if he had not been born past spoiling.  He was the only person to whom she was indulgent, and she was indulgent to him chiefly because he was so weak of will that there was not much glory in conquering him, and because her indulgence to him was a rod of affliction to the rest of her family.

Failing to open communication through Jonas and Cynthy Ann, August found himself in a desperate strait, and with an impatience common to young men he unhappily had recourse to Betsey Malcolm.  She often visited Julia, and twice, when Julia was not at meeting, he went home with the ingenuous Betsey, who always pretended to have something to tell him “about Jule,” and who yet, for the pure love of mischief-making, tried to make him think as poorly as possible of Julia’s sincerity, and who, from pure love of flirtation, puckered her red lips, and flashed at him with her sensuous eyes, and sighed and blushed, or rather flushed, while she sympathized with him in a way that might have been perilous if he had been an American instead of a constant-hearted “Dutchman,” wholly absorbed with the image of Julia.  But, so far as carrying messages was concerned, Betsey was certainly a non-conductor.  She professed never to be able to run the blockade with any communication of his.  She said to herself that she wasn’t going to help Jule Anderson to keep all the beaus.  She meant to capture one or the other of them if she could.  And, indeed, she did not dream how grievous was the wrong she did.  For she could appreciate no other feeling in the matter than vanity, and she could not see any particular harm in “taking Jule Anderson down a peg.”  And so she assured the anxious and already suspicious August that if she was in his place she should want that singing-master out of the way.  “Some girls can’t stand people that wear jewelry and mustaches and straps and such things.  And Mr. Humphreys is very careful of her, won’t let her sit too late on the porch, and is very comforting in his way of talking to her.  And she seems to like it.  I tell you what it is, Gus “—­and she looked at him so bewitchingly that the pure and sensitive August blushed, he could hardly tell why—­“I tell you Jule’s a nice girl, and got a nice property back of her, and I hope she won’t act like her mother.  And, indeed, I can’t hardly believe she will, though the way she eyes that Humphreys makes me mad.”  She had suggested the old doubt.  A doubt is dangerous when its face grows familiar, and one recognizes the “Monsieur Tonson come again.”