“Purl two, knit two, an inch and a half—” Mrs. Burke muttered to herself as she read the printed directions which lay in her lap, and then she added encouragingly:
“So you get lonesome, do you, Jonathan, durin’ the long evenin’s, when it gets dark early.”
“Oh, awful lonesome,” Jonathan responded. “Don’t you ever get lonesome yourself, Hepsey?”
“I can’t say as it kept me awake nights. ’Tisn’t bein’ alone that makes you lonesome. The most awful lonesomeness in the world is bein’ in a crowd that’s not your kind.”
“That’s so, Hepsey. But two isn’t a crowd. Don’t 163 you think you’d like to get married, if you had a right good chance, now?”
Hepsey gave her visitor a quick, sharp glance, and inquired:
“What would you consider a right good chance, Jonathan?”
“Oh, suppose that some respectable widower with a tidy sum in the bank should ask you to marry him; what would you say, Hepsey?”
“Can’t say until I’d seen the widower, to say nothin’ of the bank book—one, two, three, four, five, six—”
Jonathan felt that the crisis was now approaching; so, moving his chair a little nearer, he resumed excitedly: