“Somebody had to. You told Nabby that you would throw a regular nurse out of the window. I knew you couldn’t do that to me.”
“Humph! If I had had my senses I should have tried. Who is running the post office?”
“I am. I go down there before the mails come in and when the outgoin’ mail has to be got ready. Millard and Abbie are there other times.”
“How about your bonnet making?”
“I do my share of that. I have finished two hats right here in this room. They were pretty good-lookin’ hats, too, if I do say it.”
“Humph!... Pshaw!... Well, here’s the real thing I want to know: Is it true that somebody else—Eben Hopkins’s family—are living in that house I rent to you?”
“Why, yes, it is. I couldn’t live in it. I had enough to keep me busy up here. Eben is dreadfully anxious to buy that house; you know that. I couldn’t sell it to him, for it isn’t mine to sell.”
“No,” emphatically, “you are right, it isn’t.”
“But I could rent it to him for six months; sublet it at a bigger rent than I pay you, and make a little extra money. So that is what I did. He’s taken it furnished, with my things in it. By the time his six months are up he’ll want to buy it more than ever, or I miss my guess. If you take my advice you’ll sell it to him.”
He tried to lean forward in the chair, gave it up and sank back again.