voice. When he had left, the matchmaker's instinct led Mrs. Larrabee to warn Debby not to waste her time on him.  "Two old maids talkin' at once is more'n I can stand."

Three times that year Newt Meldrum was in town and called on Deborah. She asked him to supper once, and he simply raved over the salt-rising biscuits and the peach-pusserves. After supper he asked if he might smoke. That was the last word in masculine possession. If frankincense and myrrh had been shaken about the room Debby and Mrs. Larrabee could not have cherished them as they did the odor of tobacco in the curtains next day. Mrs. Larrabee cried a little. Her husband had smoked.

Deborah was only now passing through the stages the average woman travels in her teens and early twenties, Deborah was having callers. Sometimes two men came at once and tried to freeze each other out. And finally she had a proposal!–from Asaph!–from Josie's and Birdaline's Asaph! They had left him alone with Debby once too often.

CHAPTER VIII

It was not a romantic wooing, and Asaph was not offering the first love Asaph was not offering the first love of a bachelor heart. He was a trade-broken widower with a series of assorted orphans on his hands. And his declaration was dragged out of him by jealousy and fear.

Jim Crawford, after numerous failures to decoy Deborah, had at last offered her the position of head saleswoman; this included not only authority and increase of pay, but two trips a year to New York as buyer!

Deborah's soul hungered to make that journey before she died, but she put even this temptation from her as an ingratitude to Asaph. Still, when Asaph called the next evening it amused her to tell him that she was going to transfer herself to Crawford's–just to see what he would say and to amuse him. Her trifling joke brought a drama down on her head.

Asaph turned pale, gulped: "You're going to leave me, Deborah! Why, I–I couldn't get along without you. I don't know what I'd do if I couldn't talk to you all the time. Jim Crawford's in love with you, the old scoundrel! But I won't let you marry him. I got a nicer house than what he has for you to live in, too. There's the childern, of course, but you like childern. They'd love you. They need mothering something awful. I been meaning to ask you to marry me, but I was afraid to. But I couldn't let you go. You won't, will you? I want you should marry me–right off. You will, won't you?"

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