Amelia was putting down her bread for its last rising, and her face flushed.
"Yes," she said gently, "he was good."
"But there!" continued aunt Ann, dismissing all lighter considerations, "I dunno's that's any reason why you should bake in a tin kitchen, nor why you should need to heat up the brick oven every week, when 't was only done to please him, an' he ain't here to know. Now, 'Melia, le's see what you could do. When you got the range in, 't would alter this kitchen all over. Why don't you tear down that old-fashioned mantelpiece in the fore-room?"
"I could have a marble one," responded Amelia in a low voice. She had taken her sewing again, and she bent her head over it as if she were ashamed. A flush had risen in her cheeks, and her hand trembled.
"Wide marble! real low down!" confirmed aunt Ann, in a tone of triumph. "So fur as that goes, you could have a marble-top table." She laid down her knitting, and looked about her, a spark of excited anticipation in her eyes. All the habits of a lifetime urged her on to arrange and rearrange, in pursuit of domestic perfection. People used to say, in her first married days, that Ann Doby wasted more time in planning conveniences about her house than she ever saved by them "arter she got 'em." In her active years, she was, in local phrase, "a driver." Up and about early and late, she directed and managed until her house seemed to be a humming hive of industry and thrift. Yet there was never anything too urgent in that sway. Her beaming good-humor acted as a buffer between her and the doers of her will; and though she might scold, she never rasped and irritated. Nor had she really succumbed in the least to the disease which had practically disabled her. It might confine her to a chair and render her dependent upon the service of others, but over it, also, was she spiritual victor. She could sit in her kitchen and issue orders; and her daughter, with no initiative genius of her own, had all aunt Ann's love of "springin' to it." She cherished, besides, a worshipful admiration for her mother; so that she asked no more than to act as the humble hand under that directing head. It was Amos who tacitly rebelled. When a boy in school, he virtually gave up talking, and thereafter opened his lips only when some practical exigency was to be filled. But once did he vouchsafe a reason for that eccentricity. It was in his fifteenth year, as aunt Ann remembered well, when the minister had called; and Amos, in response to some remark about his hope of salvation, had looked abstractedly out of the window.
"I'd be ashamed," announced aunt Ann, after the minister had gone,—"Amos, I would be ashamed, if I couldn't open my head to a minister o' the gospel!"
"If one head's open permanent in a house, I guess that fills the bill," said Amos, getting up to seek the woodpile. "I ain't goin' to interfere with nobody else's contract."
His mother looked after him with gaping lips, and, for the space of half an hour, spoke no word.
To-day she saw before her an alluring field of action; the prospect roused within her energies never incapable of responding to a spur.
"My soul, 'Melia!" she exclaimed, looking about the kitchen with a dominating eye, "how I should like to git hold o' this house! I al'ays did have a hankerin' that way, an' I don't mind tellin' ye. You could change it all round complete."