You’ve been doing it ever since you were a kid. There, stop looking as if some one was going to cut off your breathing supply! It’s all right. I’ll forget the whole thing—so far as my actions towards Oz are concerned. Only, warn him not to do anything to make me remember it again. As for this mess he’s stirred up, in the Advocate, I can’t see what special effect it’ll have. Uncle Oz was too well loved, hereabouts, for it to make his memory ridiculous.”

But, within the day, Thaxton learned of at least one “special effect” the news item was to have. At four o’clock that afternoon, he received a state visit from a little old lady whom he loved much for herself and more for her[35] niece. The visitor was Miss Hester Gregg, Doris’s aunt and adoptive mother.

[35]

“Please say you’re glad to see me, Thax,” she greeted Vail. “And please say it, now. Because when you hear what I’ve come for, you’ll hate me. Not that I mind being hated, you know,” she added. “But you lack the brain to hate, intelligently. You’d make a botch of it. And I like you too well to see you bungle. Now shall I tell you what I’ve come for?”

“If you don’t,” he replied, solemnly, “I shall begin hating you for getting my curiosity all worked up, like this. Blaze away.”

“In the first place,” she began, “you know all about our agonies, with the decorators, at Stormcrest. You’ve barked your shins over their miserable pails and paper-rolls, every time you’ve tried to lure Doris into a dark corner of our veranda. Well, I figured we could stay on, while they were plying their accursèd trade. I thought we could retreat before them, from room to room; and at last slip around them and take up our abode in the rooms they had finished, while they were working on the final ones. It was a pretty thought. But we can’t. We found that out, to-day. We’re like old Baldy Tod, up at Montgomery. He set out to paint[36] his kitchen floor, and he painted himself into a corner. We’re decorated into a corner. We’ve got to get out, Doris and I, for at least a week; while they finish the house. We’ve nowhere to live. Be it never so jumbled there’s no place at home—”

[36]

“But—”

“We drove over to Stockbridge, to-day, to see if we could get rooms in either of the hotels. (We’ll have to be near here; so I can oversee the miserable activities of the decorators, every day.) No use. Both hotels disgustingly full of tourists. The return of all 

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