Deborah stared at him agape. Then she cried: "Asaph Shillaber, are you proposing to me or quarreling with me–which?"

"I'm proposin' to you, darn it, and I won't take 'No' for an answer."

Deborah had often wondered what she would say if the impossible should happen and a man should ask for her hand. And now it had come in the unlikeliest way, and what she said was:

"Sakes alive! Ase, one of us must be crazy!"

Asaph was in a panic; and he besieged and besought till she told him she would think it over.  The sensation was too delicious to be finished with an immediate monosyllable. He went away blustering. Her mother had slept through the cataclysm. Deborah postponed telling her, and went to her room in a state of ecstatic distress.

Her room was prettier than it had been, and the bureau was more bravely equipped. It was a place of interesting mystery; there were curling-irons and skin-foods and nail-powders, and what not?

Now she was asked to give up this loneliness, this lifelong privacy, with its blessing and its bane, to move over into a man's house and share his room and her life with him.

Only, now she was asked this at the period when many women were returning to a second spinstership and one of her friends, who had married young and whose daughter had married young, was a grandmother. Deborah was experiencing the terror that assails young brides, the dread of the profoundest revolution in woman's life. Only in her case the terror was the greater from the double duration of her maidenhood. She was still a girl, and yet gray was in her hair.

The thought of marriage was almost intolerably fearful, and yet it was almost intolerably beautiful.

How wonderful that she should be asked to marry the ideal of her youth–she, the laughing-stock of the other girls; and now she could have a husband, a home, and children of various ages, from the little tot to the grown-ups. She would never have babies of her own, she supposed, but she could acquire them ready-made. All her stifled domestic instincts flamed at the new empire offered her.

And then she remembered Josie and Josie's sneer: "Poor old Debby. She never was a rose."

And now Josie was dead a year and more, and Josie's children and Josie's lover were submitted to her to take or leave. What a revenge it would be! What a 

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