A moment’s intense silence followed the matron’s public reading of this letter in the large hall which served as the community room of the Old Ladies’ Home. The matron, her young gray eyes twinkling and shining, looked from one old face to the other. Some were broadly grinning under their crowns of gray hair, some were hurt and scornful, some were only puzzled and amazed—these belonging to the old ladies who had held their shriveled, shaking hands as trumpets before their ears during the reading of the letter. And some faces were marred by a shrewd, keen, calculating look as if to exclaim: “I wonder if—!” The matron looked at them all, her smile slowly growing broader, then quickly she looked down at her desk and said with business-like briskness:

“That is a very honest letter. I wish you could all give it your serious attention. There is no fraud in it, for I have telephoned to the Old Men’s Home, and Mr. Jessup is a noble, straightforward character. Now, are any of you willing to see him this afternoon? I suggest that all those who can not or who will not give Mr. Jessup a chance for their hands this afternoon, leave the hall.”

There was a curious reluctance on the part of the old ladies to move. There was much wagging of heads, much nudging of elbows, whispers and winks and murmurs from every quarter, but no one stirred. Those who really had no personal interest or legitimate right to an interest in Mr. Jessup’s quest for a wife stayed to see what the others might do. The matron repeated her request. Then old Mrs. Smith, bent and humpbacked, took up her cane and hobbled slowly toward the stairway.

“Ef he wanted me,” she declared with mock asperity, “he should oughter come twenty year ago. Ye notice,” she added, looking over her shoulder with her sharp, shrewd peaked face, “he didn’t tell how old he was.”

“He’s sixty-nine,” laughed the matron. “Most men of his age would have insisted on a wife of eighteen.”

There was a scurrying sound among the group of old ladies and suddenly there darted across the hall a younger, slimmer, straighter figure than Mrs. Smith’s.

“Miss Ellie!” protestingly called the matron, “where are you going?”

Miss Ellie paused, her face flushed with shame to think she had not fled from the hall before. She paused and looked at the matron. However old she was, Miss Ellie did not look more than fifty years. Her hair was luxuriant, half silver, half gold, faded, yet giving a curious effect of a halo of moonlight. The flush mounted higher up the spinster’s cheeks until it crept over her forehead to the edge of her hair. For a moment she stood thus, looking at the youthful matron. Then, with a world of reproach in her tones, she said simply: “Miss Jessica!” Then she went up the stairs with quick and trembling limbs, but with an air of dignity that acted as a rebuke upon those lingering the hall.

“Proud Miss Ellie!” murmured Jessica, herself feeling ashamed.

“I do think,” began Mrs. Honan in a loud, strident key, “I do think myself that the man didn’t show very fine feeling. The idea of him a-spectin’ a woman ter jump at his head. Ef he wanted a wife, why didn’t he come a-lookin’ around modest an’ quiet-like in the good, old fashioned way?”

With that she swept out of the hall. She was down on the register as having passed her seventy-third birthday, and anyway, she mused, she had always preferred a yard full of chickens to a yard full of flowers, because chickens are more lively. They keep you better company, she said. Then, with or without verbal excuse, one woman after another left the hall. There were two with the deplorable squint, several far on the shaded side of seventy, some who wore honest wigs, and some too honest to proclaim either that they did not dye their hair or that they had never sniffed at the contents of a snuffbox. Then there were the dear old ladies loyal to their dead husbands, the old ladies who did not care to give up the serene, uneventful security of the Old Ladies’ Home for a house shared only with a man afflicted with lumbago and very decided notions. However, ten remained, openly ashamed, yet not sufficiently ashamed to reject Samuel Jessup’s hand before they had seen him.

“It don’t mean that none of us promise to take him, oh no!” said Mrs. Young, a woman living in the memories of her long reign as a belle. “It only means that we’d like to get a good look at him. We’ve had plenty of chances all our lives. We ain’t none of us here because no man wanted us—neither us widders nor us maidens. We’re here from ch’ice, Miss Jessica, from ch’ice! But still if there’s another ch’ice open to us with a real, kind honest man—his letter shows he’s that, bless his heart!—we’d each of us ten like to have one tenth of a show at him.”

Then, greatly flustered at having spoken with such unmaidenly freedom on such a subject, Mrs. Young moved away from the desk across the hall and out of doors, where she could take a good long breath. After she had gone, one of the nine remaining candidates wondered aloud how Mrs. Young would look without her false front, for of course no one would deceive Samuel Jessup as to her quantity of hair.

“But the rest of it?” whispered another. “You can’t wash all that dye off in one day, can you?”

“Waal!” retorted a third, coming hotly to Mrs. Young’s rescue, “a man who wears a wig hasn’t no right ter be so particular.”

Said the first one firmly: “She shouldn’t deceive him.”

Answered a third: “Deceive him all she wants ter as long as it’s in somethin’ no man would have wit enough ter find out.”

At three o’clock to the minute, Samuel Jessup appeared, emerging from a closed coach together with a plump middle-aged woman who carried with extraordinary care a large market basket covered with a red tablecloth.

“Good gracious!” exclaimed Mrs. Young, peeking with half the household from the upper hall windows. “He’s been an’ picked up a wife on the road an’ come to offer his apologies.”

She laughed merrily at the possible joke against them all. And yet what a pity that would be, too, for Samuel was a pleasant, self-reliant looking little man with his head hanging sideways as if he had never lifted it from a one-sided attack of the mumps. Somehow this attitude made him appear younger. But the wig! That was too much in evidence and they all decided that it must be clipped at once. Samuel did not scan the house with lover-like eagerness as he came up the steps. Instead, he watched the basket with intense interest—so intense that he stumbled on the way.

“I bet he’s got a dog in it!” cried one of the candidates. “I will not stand no leetle measly pet dog around the house, a-sheddin’ hair all over the parlor sofy. I ain’t agoin’ downstairs!”

But she went with the others and met Mr. Jessup. The woman with the basket was nowhere in sight, having been relegated to the dining-room. No attempt whatever was made to explain her to the old ladies. Samuel Jessup was immediately enthroned by the matron in her private office; and one by one in alphabetical order of their names, Jessica sent the candidates to him, thinking that this would be more delicate than to have them all face him at once. Delicacy in this affair did not seem so difficult after coming face to face with little Mr. Jessup. Very modestly, and with his head more on one side than ever, he told the matron that she must convey to the ladies his doubts as to any one of them accepting him. He thought it was very kind of them to receive him anyway, and—this with a quick keen look into Jessica’s wise and bonny face—he hoped that they would not laugh at him.

The first five filed out of the room after only a few moments’ conversation, each briefly explaining in her turn why Mr. Jessup “hadn’t took” with her. One did not like the way he held his head. One never could stand that wig. She knew that it got askew every time he took a nap. One thought him too much like her dead husband. One thought him too unlike her departed John to make a happy union possible. One said she never could bear a pump dribbling water in the kitchen; and he was too stubborn and “sot” in his ways to take it out. Then went in the sixth—she who had not rebuked the deceit of Mrs. Young’s dyed hair and she who hated pet dogs. After a longer period, she came out and with customary candor bluntly declared that she would have had Samuel Jessup in a minute, but she saw that she did not take with him.

“The woman that gits him will be lucky,” she declared, “basket and all.” Nothing more would she tell. Then into the private room went the seventh old lady. She immediately demanded of Samuel an explanation of the woman and the basket; whereupon Samuel said that he refused to be questioned by any woman and he knew that they could not get along well together. She came out sniffing contemptuously, and vowed that in her opinion there was something very mysterious about this man. Number Eight went in even more eagerly, on tip-toe. She had read romances all her life. She loved mysteries and she was so sensitive about living in an Old Ladies’ Home partly on charity that she would have married any man that asked her. Almost any man—but not quite. She and Samuel Jessup talked together for a long time.

“I am sure we would git along,” said Samuel at last, his heart stirred to sympathy for one who hated a Home of this sort with the same proud hatred that he had borne. “But,” he went on, “before I let you decide, I be agoin’ to take you into the dining-room and show you the basket. What belongs in the basket belongs with me an’s agoin’ with me. I ain’t much ter git, but come an’ see the basket!”

Her romantic old heart beating high with excitement, Miss Ruby tip-toed ahead of him, across a tiny, dark back hall into the dining-room. On the very threshold she paused, her eyes popping out of her head as she looked within; then she uttered a faint scream and went scuttling into a corner among the shadows of the dim passage.

“Good-bye, Mr. Jessup!” she called tragically. “Good-bye!” and there ended Samuel Jessup’s affair with Miss Ruby.

A humorous light twinkled in the old man’s eye as he went back into Jessica’s office and waited for the ninth candidate. She was a woman famous in the Home for always managing to find some one to wait upon her, and she wanted a house of her own with several servants, an unobtrusive husband, and stained glass windows in the parlor.

“I kinder fancied stained glass winders myself,” said Samuel. “But you can’t be keepin’ a hull passel o’ servants. One servant gal—that’s all I agree to, ma’am.”

She thought that one servant might do if they put out the washing. Samuel looked dubious for a moment, seeing himself a henpecked husband, and then that twinkle came again into his wholesome eye.

“Before we decide, m’am, I want ter show you what I got in that there basket. Me an’ the basket be inseparable.”

She preceded him into the dining-room, her shoulders high and her nose uplifted. She stood for some moments staring at the contents of the basket, the basket’s owner, and the basket’s guardian staring at her. Slowly her face grew rigid. She shook her head once. She strove to speak, swallowed hard and then gasped;

“How dast you presume, Samuel Jessup!”

Samuel winked at the guardian of the basket and chuckled soft and low. But then he realized that he really wanted a wife, a companion in his old age, a mistress for the snug little home, and now there was but one candidate left. To be sure he might find some one outside the Home, but he had wanted in truth to share all that he had—the basket not excepted—with one who had tasted as he had the well buttered bread of charity in an old folks’ home. Soberly he went back to the private room, and Mrs. Young came drifting leisurely in to him. She congratulated herself on being the last. She wanted never to be twitted with having failed to give the others every possible chance, and she knew that had she entered the private room first the result would have been the same. She would be the wife selected by Mr. Jessup if she wanted him. A woman with real charm for old men, a woman who could have graced many a home in her lazy, yet pleasingly frivolous ways, she felt that Samuel could not resist her if she chose to throw her charm around him.

“This is a very ridiculous position,” she began, with a quavering little trill of laughter. “I never went a-seekin’ a man before. They always sought me.”

This was more than Samuel’s natural gallantry could withstand. He took her small lean fingers in his and drew her down beside him on the couch. Her fingers twined around his hand. She wore jewels—relics of bygone splendors—which seemed pitifully out of keeping with her present state. To Samuel they told a long, familiar story, and sent a feeling of pity out from him to her.

“Mis’ Young,” he said gently. “I am jest as much obliged to all of you folks fer seein’ me as I kin be.”

“To us all?” she asked and lifted her eyes.

They had been very fine blue eyes once and now they were bright in spite of their puffy lids. And her thin hair, parted simply in the middle, was more becoming than the false front had been. He wondered that she had no gray hairs, but was too straightforward himself to suspect the deception. What a very pretty woman she still was, and, with that not displeasing girlish attempt at flirtation, how exceedingly feminine!

“Obliged to us all?” she repeated, her eyes still uplifted, her hand still clinging to his. She remembered how eloquently hands can speak and so did Samuel, but of a sudden he felt that his horny old hand had become tongue-tied. He knew that she wanted him to say: “I be obliged to you in perticular, Mis’ Young.”

And he did stumble through some such gallant speech, but all the while he was thinking: “So I have got to take this! This frivolous old lady with a spot of red paint on either cheek and a pair of penciled eye-brows.” Why had he not mentioned rouge in his letter? Mrs. Young still looked at him, still held his hand, remembering of old the value of long looks and of silence. Of a truth many and many a man had she captivated in this way in the days of long ago and once again in her mind’s eye she could see suitor after suitor at her feet. She had refused them all, after the first one had given her his name and then gone into the unknown world. Even after coming into the Old Ladies’ Home, she had refused offers of marriage, and yet, now of a sudden, she wished to share the good fortune and the ill fortune of Samuel Jessup. She laid her free hand on his shoulder and murmured a line from her favorite Browning—Browning who was a mere name and scarcely that to Samuel:

Samuel was embarrassed. He pushed his wig back from his brow and, going opposite to the natural, sidewise slant of his head, it gave him a rakish expression, delightful to Mrs. Young’s eye. Then all of a kindle with the light of an eager hope went Samuel’s own brown orbs.

“Yes, yes,” he said glibly, “but the best ain’t ter be. It’s here, right now, in the dinin’-room. Come along with me.”

He was so mixed as to his own desires and emotions that he half hoped, half feared that she would stand the test, but when she saw the basket and its contents, first horror crossed her face, then the shadow of a deep disappointment fell among the wrinkles and the rouge and the penciled eye-brows. Sadly she faced Samuel Jessup as if certain of his answer before her questioning:

“And you insist on a-keeping it?”

“It’s mine. It belongs ter me. I had it jest half a day, but now all the women in the country couldn’t make me give it up. I don’t want ter be imperlite,” added Samuel in a milder tone, “but them’s the facts. Me an’ the basket, or ‘Good-bye, Samuel.’”

She interpreted him literally. Holding out her fragile, jeweled hand, she clasped his warmly, yet with honest sadness and compassion:

“Good-bye, Samuel. If it hadn’t been for the basket—.” She paused, slowly withdrawing her hand, and then went on again: “You’re makin’ an awful mistake. Who’d a thought it of a man o’ your age! I shall never forget you. Good-bye, Samuel.”

With one swift, half hungering, half frightened glance at the basket, she slipped out of the room. Samuel did not laugh and his eyes did not twinkle as he went up to the matron’s desk.

“Miss Jessica, they’ve all practically refused me. What shall I do?” He had a vision of an endless quest of an eligible, willing old lady from an old folks’ home.

Miss Jessica thought a long while, biting the end of her pencil, and at last she said slowly, half reluctantly:

“There is one more—who—answers your requirements, but she was too proud to enter the lists.”

Samuel’s face lit up. Proud women can be very tender and only a tender soul could accept the basket. Moreover, a woman with sufficient spirit to resent his action today was a woman after his own heart. He lifted his head from its sidewise slant and, throwing back his shoulders, looked Jessica square in the eyes:

“What’s the woman’s name?”

“Miss Ellie Smith.”

“Waal, I be goin’ ter change it!” vowed Mr. Jessup. “Whar be she?”

The matron hesitated, wondering whether she could play the part of the traitor to dignified, self-reliant Miss Ellie, but Jessica was very young. She looked down the long years that these two had traveled, and seeing how dusty and stony and hard the road had been, wondered why they should not come into a restful, fragrant garden at last. Ellie, she knew, even yet, with the help of the right man, could make the garden. And now as she looked keenly into Samuel Jessup’s eyes—eyes shaded by iron-gray brows, but deep, dark brown eyes, limpid, sparkling, full of tenderness and an appealing hunger for tenderness—she felt that Samuel could play an all-sufficient Adam to Ellie’s Eve, in the garden.

“Miss Ellie’s all alone in the kitchen, hulling strawberries for supper,” she said very low. Then bending far over her desk, as if completely absorbed in her books, she went on: “It’s the south dining-room door. Go right in, take the basket with you—no, no, not that woman, too—and ask Miss Ellie if she won’t take charge of your basket for an hour or so.”

Samuel grinned. He wagged his head back and forth until his wig shook in sympathetic anticipation. Years and years seemed to fall from him, until with his small, thick-set figure and his sparkling, youthful eyes he looked like a boy getting ready to steal apples. With short, firm, quicksteps he entered the dining-room. No one would have thought him a victim of lumbago from his gait now. Then of a sudden, Miss Jessica, no longer able to contain herself, went into her private room, where he had consulted with the ten, and danced around with glee.

“Miss Ellie, you darling!” she whispered to herself. “I know you’ll do it!”

Miss Ellie, in a prim, dainty blue gingham dress, with a great bib apron enveloping her slender figure, sat at the south kitchen window hulling berries, the basket of red fruit on the table beside her, a yellow earthen bowl in her lap. Her silver-gold hair caught sunbeam lights from the window until each single thread danced and twinkled. Little curls of silver gold nestled against the nape of her slender neck. Her face was that of an April lady’s—first the clouds chased across it, clouds of contempt, of anger and of regret; and then it took on a soft blaze of tenderness and of passionate longing.

She did not want Mr. Samuel Jessup or any other man. She scorned the woman who might take him today for his home and that little sum of money; but why—why had she with all her power of loving and of attracting love, all the unspent passion of motherhood that had been her ruling passion since the doll-baby age—why had she come to see sixty-one without finding Mr. Right? Lovers in moderate numbers she had had in the days of long ago, and old people do not forget the loves of the springtime, but all the while—all through the spring and the summer and this swiftly passing autumn—or was it really winter-time?—there had never come to her one whom she would rejoice to call her mate! Him she did not regret so much nowadays, or she regretted him with a vague, indistinct feeling. He might have liked strong drink and smoked a strong pipe indoors. But the children! Ah, the children that had never come!

She had outlived all her people. There were no nieces, no nephews, no one in all the world whom she could call her own, and there had never been and never could be a little grandchild to pull at her skirts.

“Dran-ma! I love oo, dran-ma!” Only yesterday she had heard a little child lisp this into the ears of Mrs. Young.

“Dran-ma, I love oo, dran-ma!” whispered Ellie, bending far over the berries with the hot gushing of tears coming into her eyes.

Both the ache of motherhood and the ache of grandmotherhood were upon her. Never to have felt the touch of her own babe at her breast! And, now that old age had withered the breast, never to hear the prattle of grandchildren in her ears! And her ears were still so finely attuned, unlike the average grandmother! Miss Ellie looked up from her berries at the window. Her eyes were too dim to see, and wiping the tears away she looked out of the window again, down the garden. So, young girls stare wistfully as if they would look to the very end of the world and discover what, in the very end, may come to them.

The dining-room door opened. Miss Ellie turned back to her task. She scorned to look up and ask her fellow inmate of the Home who had won Samuel Jessup. It was probably Mrs. Homan coming to help with the supper. Steps came across the kitchen. Ellie bent far over the yellow bowl and went on with her berry hulling. It needed a great many berries to supply that supper table. The sunbeam darted down from the top of Ellie’s head to seek out with its twinkling, gold-shod feet the silver-gold curls in Ellie’s neck. The steps paused close beside Ellie. Suddenly the spinster realized that they were not Mrs. Homan’s steps and she looked up. Scorn, indignation, amazement, and then something more subtle, something which one sees in faces everywhere all over the world, and something which makes the world more beautiful, crossed her face. There stood Samuel Jessup with the huge market basket in one hand. He held out the basket to Miss Ellie. He looked at her eagerly, almost with piteous appeal, as if to say:

“They would have none of it, but—you! You?”

The red table cover had been thrown off the basket. There lay the contents before Miss Ellie’s eyes. A big white pillow and resting upon it, a baby—a real, live, pink-and-white, wide-awake baby. More than this, a baby who at first sight of Miss Ellie holding poised in her hand a huge, red strawberry, struggled up into a sitting position, held out his two pudgy, dimpled little hands and cried with the softest, most ecstatic little cry imaginable: “Dranny!”

The baby’s grandmother had died last week, but neither Miss Ellie nor the baby knew that, and Samuel Jessup kept a wise silence.

Trembling, agitated, scarcely able to see or hear for the moment following the baby’s cry, Miss Ellie put down the red berry, placed the bowl on the table, and then turned to take the baby. She asked no questions. She simply took him. She knew that he was hers. Even now again—would her heart burst with joy and her ears lose their power of hearing!—even now again he was murmuring and mumbling: “Dranny! Dranny!” Now she knew that she would hear the prattle of one she called grandchild in her ears and guide with her shriveled old hands the unsteady movements of these little feet. Samuel Jessup counted not at all just then; but if he had attempted to take away that baby, she would have fought him like a mother-tigress.

Samuel had meant to say much. He said nothing, but simply put his hand against his throat and looked at her. He saw her devour with eyes and lips the tender little form—saw her seek out the baby wrinkles in the fat little dimpled neck—saw her munch hungrily at the baby’s yellow curls—saw her feel every bone of the little body through the stiff starchy white dress as if she loved each one more than the other. And then at length he watched her unfasten the shoes, pull off the tiny white socks and then adore with the pent-up passion of the lonely years the adorable little rosy heel of his baby.

Samuel cleared his throat with a loud noise and walked across the room. He noticed a red calico curtain at the cupboard door and wondered whether Miss Ellie had made it. In his mind’s eye, he saw another kitchen, smaller than this, cosier, but still with red calico curtains at the cupboard door and crisp white swiss ones—as crisp as the baby’s dress—at the windows. He knew that Miss Ellie would not want to get those curtains stained up with tobacco smoke—she looked so dainty—so he would volunteer to do his smoking on the back porch. If she left the window open, he could look through and talk to her and the little one. He came beside Miss Ellie’s chair and stood looking down at her lovely head and the baby’s cheek pressed against her own. The baby, quieted with happiness against that breast, was profoundly still.

Through the open door came a wonderful fragrance—as the fragrance of youthful love—blown in from the syringa bush beside the kitchen door. They must plant a syringa beside the kitchen door-step in the new home, thought Samuel. Out of the stillness, he spoke, his voice very husky.

“You be a woman arter my own heart—I knowed it when I see you a-settin’ here a-hullin’ berries. It’s more than I ’spected. I never dreamed it could be: I was that old. But, Miss Ellie, you be—you be—” He lost his voice entirely for a space and fearfully, reverently, he lifted in his trembling fingers one of the silver-gold curls that lay on her neck, lifted it and immediately let it fall in place again. “You be,” he whispered, “a woman arter my own heart. I never found sech a one when I was young. I know it now, fer ef I had, I wouldn’t ’a’ been afeared of no bad luck fer neither her ner me. I’d a took her an’—” another pause and then with brave, masculine assurance, “she’d ’a’ took me.”

Miss Ellie did not move, she did not speak. She felt that his voice was very far away, away off back in her youth where she had dreamed of the mate who was yet to come. Closer she pressed her cheek to the baby’s and so assured herself that baby and the man who had brought her the baby were real and belonged to today.

Samuel was speaking again, his hand now on the back of her chair, so that it brushed against the ruffle that ran across the shoulders of her apron.

“I allers wanted children, an’ when I got too old to have the hope o’ ever a-marryin’, I used ter say ter myself: ‘Oh, ef they was only leetle grand-younguns now!’ Then the fortune come. Says I fust thing: ‘I’ll have a baby. I’ll be a granddaddy yit.’ Thar wa’n’t much mean about me. I be sixty-nine, but I wanted my own home, an’ my own wife, an’ my own baby. But I wanted the baby most of all. So the fust thing I done when the money come was ter go to that thar Margaret Jane Orphan Asylum an git this here baby. He hadn’t been there but a week. Jest lost his grandma an’ his grandpa—didn’t yer, yer pore leetle cuss, yer? He’s legally adopted. His name is Samuel Biggs Jessup, Jr. Ain’t he a wallopin’ fine feller!”

Samuel exploded at the last. His bashfulness, his self-depreciation, his afraidness, were all gone. He bent over, his hands on his knees, and looked into the baby’s face. The baby’s face was very close to Ellie’s. The baby’s face was dimpled and smiling, while over Ellie’s face there was a flush of joyous young motherhood together with the proud, all-wondering delight of grandmotherhood, and blending with both, a sweet shame and shrinking such as no one but a virgin can wear. Oh, exquisite, young-old Miss Ellie! Your eyes swimming in unshed tears were so beautiful then with the inner light that Samuel blinked to see them.

“Miss Ellie,” he whispered. Very still was the kitchen. The syringa outside the door shook out its perfume just for these two. The wind murmured through the fragrant flowers—it murmured:

“Again and again and again! Even for the old, this same old story!”

“Ellie,” whispered Samuel. “I want you even more than I want the baby. Will you marry me?”

Again the silence fell, and after a long while, the voice of Ellie’s dream-swept, ideal-keeping youth came from within the curves of the baby’s cheek where her lips were hiding:

“Samuel, you been a long time comin’.” Her voice faltered and then gathering a girlish tremor went on, “But, even ef you hadn’t brought the baby, I should say you was wuth all the waitin’.”