"I think that's a good plan, Matthew," said his mother, who was knitting quietly in her rocker. "And while the house is all upside down and workmen in it, why couldn't I go and make Lorenzo and Lulu a little visit in Vermont? Could you spare me all right?"
"Sure I could! Maria Snow would come in and clear me up once a week and cook me a batch of victuals, and I could go to Mrs. Wilkins's and get a meal now and then; she's taking transients. I've got Bill Benson comin' Monday to help with milkin' and hayin', you know, but he can board himself. I'll sleep in the shed-chamber while you're gone, so the workmen can have a free hand. Jiminy, mother, we'll give a jamboree after harvestin'! I declare I'm all het up over the idea of our improvements."
"Well, I only hope they'll turn out to be improvements," his mother answered serenely. "Anyhow you're a young man and likely to live in the house the rest of your life. You'd ought to have it to suit you, Matthew, and make it nice for a wife and children in comin' years."
Matthew blushed to the roots of his hair, and as he took his candle and started for the back stairs, he turned and said, like a shy schoolboy: "I was kind o' thinkin' o' them myself, mother, that's the truth. Though," he added with a laugh, "I don't know exactly who they be, nor what they'll look like."
Mrs. Milliken locked the shed door, turned out the lamp, then lighted her own candle preparatory to going to her little bedroom opening out of the kitchen.
"I guess the man that wrote, 'They also serve who only stand and wait,' knew something about mothers!" she said to herself.
Matthew, young, strong, big-hearted, simple-minded, was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. His waking hours were filled with certain confusions and perplexities, but these vanished in sleep, and his dreams were rose-colored, for he was utterly in love, and with an angel.
Tommy Mixter, aged twelve, at this moment the life and soul of a clump of small boys on the loafers' bench at the Riverboro end of the bridge, knew Undine Berry better than Matthew Milliken did, but Tommy was too young to be smitten by feminine beauty, and he was a keen judge of character. His ears had been snapped by Miss Berry's thumb and finger more than once, and he particularly disliked the way her lips were set when she called him up to ferrule him in the face of the whole school.
"For nothin' at all, neither," he was wont to say. "O' course she ain't got strength enough to hurt a skeeter, an' her dress is so tight she don't dass put on any steam for fear she'll bust it, but she'd lam you good if she knew how! Matt Milliken will be toein' the mark himself by fall, an' I won't have to lug any more o' his flowers to the next teacher, that's one good thing!"
Undine prepared herself for bed that night with a trifle more care than usual, punctuating each move in the operation by long studies of her charming self in the looking-glass, which was of poor quality and never did her entire justice. Her hair was the first subject of admiration, as she brushed the golden mop and held it up to glow in the full light of her kerosene lamp.