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Lydia retorted quietly. “They won’t survive without the roof and walls of this house to shelter them. It’s their entire world.”
    Helga gave a disgusted little snort, but her eyes were sad, and her mouth drooped at the corners. “They survived a war, Lydia,” she insisted. “They survived seeing their first home ransacked and then burned to the ground, losing the men they loved, traveling all the way out here to Arizona with the Judge and starting over from scratch. Their father pampered them, treated them like a pair of china figurines that would break if anyone breathed on them. Then Nell did the same, God rest her generous soul, and now you’re carrying on the tradition. Don’t you see, Lydia? No one ever gave Miss Mittie and Miss Millie a chance to show how strong they really are.”
    “They were young when all those things happened,” Lydia countered, very softly. “The war and the rest of it, I mean.” She’d tried to imagine what the raid on the plantation back in Virginia must have been like—flames everywhere, consuming all but a few portraits, some jewelry, a small sterling vase that had been a gift from George and Martha Washington, presented to a Fairmont ancestor in appreciation for flour and dried beans sent to Valley Forge during that desperate winter—but she knew such trauma was beyond imagining. Mittie had suffered severe burns,saving the letters Captain Stanhope had written her after accepting a commission in the Army of the Potomac, and Millie had nearly been raped by one of the raiders. A former slave called Old Billy had intervened, according to Nell’s rare and whispered accounts—shared with Helga, not Lydia—and died for his chivalry, shot through the throat.
    “Give them a chance,” Helga pleaded. “You’ll see what those old aunts of yours are made of, if you’ll just ask them how they’d truly feel about leaving here.”
    Lydia considered the idea, and then shook her head. Mittie and Millie were old now, too old to change. For her sake, they might try to make the best of things, but it was simply too much to ask of them, so late in life.
    Swallowing, she made herself meet Helga’s gaze, there in the mirror glass. “There’s been no word from Gideon, then?” she asked, tentatively and at considerable cost to her pride.
    “Not yet,” Helga answered solemnly, but there was a faint glint of hope in her pale blue eyes. “Not just yet.”
    “He won’t come,” Lydia said, almost whispering.
    But he had come when he’d received the letter, hadn’t he?
    And he’d kissed her.
    “I think you’re wrong about that,” Helga replied, turning, starting for the door. “I’ll bring you some coffee and a roll. You have to eat something, Lydia—whatever happens today, you’ll need your strength.”
    There was no point in arguing. Helga would do what Helga would do.
    And Lydia would do what Lydia would do: pour the coffee out the window, and leave the roll on the sill for the birds. Because unless a miracle happened, and Lydia had never personally encountered one of those, she would beJacob’s wife in a few hours—with all the attendant responsibilities, including the conjugal ones.
    With that prospect ahead of her, food was out of the question.
    “Thank you,” she murmured. “But I’d rather come down to the kitchen to eat, like everyone else.”
    Helga nodded, resigned, and remained her usual salty self. “Just don’t go getting the idea I’m going to be waiting on you hand and foot like some servant,” the other woman warned, “because I’m not.”
    Lydia laughed, in spite of all she would have to endure in the coming hours, days, months and years. Helga kept that huge house clean, and prepared three meals a day, but she didn’t wait on anybody unless they were about to be buried—or married .
    When Helga had gone, Lydia forced some starch into her spine, sat up straight, and regarded her image directly.
    “You have got to marry Jacob Fitch,” she told