"S'pose you go ahead now 'n tell me just what ails you?" Uncle Ambrose suggested after a reasonably sustaining pause.
And straightway Elizabeth returned to the slow and monotonous weeping that had so disturbed his nerves for the past few hours. However, he let her alone for a time, and except for moving restlessly about in his chair and biting hard on his pipe stem made no other signs until at last he placed a trembling hand on her bowed shoulder. "'Lizabeth Horton, there is some women that just nachurally runs away to tears, but I wouldn't waste myself entirely ef I was you. Seems like when a female has cried 's long as you have, she must need something to fill up the places that has gone dry on the inside; so you take another cup of coffee; it may be bitter but it's liquid. I ain't sayin' I ain't used to women's weepin', but I'm gittin' older an'——"
Elizabeth at this gulped down her second dose. "I hadn't ought to cry so much, Uncle Ambrose," she apologized, "but you must know I'm havin' to give up my little home and it most breaks my heart."
Uncle Ambrose looked meditatively about his ancient and patched fourteen-foot-square kitchen, and his dim eyes shone with the never failing pride of possession. "These cottages ain't so bad," he said defensively. "I been living in mine off'n on fer most seventy years, and I kin remember when yours and old Mrs. Barrows', now deceased, was built like it. Still I am obleeged to say there may be finer places; more'n likely now this nephew's house is stylisher where you're bein' took in to live. Seems like I've done heard it's in a su-burb and sets up on a hill. Kind er onnecessary Pennyrile's havin' a su-burb, but mebbe you're thinkin' the young folks won't be good to you when you go up there to dwell."
Now that her crying had ceased the old maid's face looked gray.
"It ain't that I ain't goin' to a good home, Uncle Ambrose," she explained, "and I suppose they'll be as good to me as they can to a piece of furniture that don't fit in and ain't nowheres needed in their house. I can't expect a man to understand, but when a woman don't never marry and hasn't a husband or children of her own, seems like all she has to set store by is just things, havin' a home of her own. I done my best to keep mine since mother died and her pension stopped, by picklin' and preservin', but somehow I can't manage it." And now the woman's voice held the quiet acceptance of defeat which is sadder than any protest of tears.
She was looking into her lap at her knotted, hardworking and yet unsuccessful hands as she spoke, or else she would have seen the light of the understanding she denied in the old face opposite hers, which had not, I think, failed any woman in nearly threescore years.
"I've done smelt your efforts, 'Lizabeth," Uncle Ambrose murmured kindly. "They've often come right through the boards of my side wall. I wisht I knowed some way to help you out, but I can't somehow see it."
Nevertheless when Elizabeth had made her old neighbour as comfortable for the night as she knew how by putting fresh coals on his fire and by fastening down his windows, and had said good night, still he continued sitting in the same place, wearing a look of uncomfortable gravity, until by and by hobbling once more into his bedroom he returned with a small daguerreotype in his hand and for a long while kept studying it, with his lips moving silently, and then suddenly said aloud: "Whatever on this earth am I goin' to do 'bout that old maid, Em'ly honey? She's poor and lonesome and she's scaired, and, moreover, she's powerful homely." And then just for an instant piercing the mists over his old eyes the immortal light of laughter flickered.
"I reckon you think I've done earned a trifle of repose from worryin' on females, don't you, honey?" he inquired as he made his solitary way toward bed.