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One evening Crooked Jack came up to fix something that had gone wrong with the Old Lady’s well. The Old Lady wandered affably out to him; for she knew he had been working at the Spencers’ all day, and there might be crumbs of information about Sylvia to be picked up.

“I reckon the music teacher’s feeling pretty blue this evening,” Crooked Jack remarked, after straining the Old Lady’s patience to the last verge of human endurance by expatiating on William Spencer’s new pump, and Mrs. Spencer’s new washing-machine, and Amelia Spencer’s new young man.

“Why?” asked the Old Lady, turning very pale. Had anything happened to Sylvia?

“Well, she’s been invited to a big party at Mrs. Moore’s brother’s in town, and she hasn’t got a dress to go in,” said Crooked Jack. “They’re great swells and everybody will be got up regardless. Mrs. Spencer was telling me about it. She says Miss Gray can’t afford a new dress because she’s helping to pay her aunt’s doctor’s bills. She says she’s sure Miss Gray feels awful disappointed over it, though she doesn’t let on. But Mrs. Spencer says she knows she was crying after she went to bed last night.”

The Old Lady turned and went into the house abruptly. This was dreadful. Sylvia must go to that party–she MUST. But how was it to be managed? Through the Old Lady’s brain passed wild thoughts of her mother’s silk dresses. But none of them would be suitable, even if there were time to make one over. Never had the Old Lady so bitterly regretted her vanished wealth.

“I’ve only two dollars in the house,” she said, “and I’ve got to live on that till the next day the egg pedlar comes round. Is there anything I can sell–ANYTHING? Yes, yes, the grape jug!”

Up to this time, the Old Lady would as soon have thought of trying to sell her head as the grape jug. The grape jug was two hundred years old and had been in the Lloyd family ever since it was a jug at all. It was a big, pot-bellied affair, festooned with pink-gilt grapes, and with a verse of poetry printed on one side, and it had been given as a wedding present to the Old Lady’s great-grandmother. As long as the Old Lady could remember it had sat on the top shelf in the cupboard in the sitting-room wall, far too precious ever to be used.

Two years before, a woman who collected old china had explored Spencervale, and, getting word of the grape jug, had boldly invaded the old Lloyd place and offered to buy it. She never, to her dying day, forgot the reception the Old Lady gave her; but, being wise in her day and generation, she left her card, saying that if Miss Lloyd ever changed her mind about selling the jug, she would find that she, the aforesaid collector, had not changed hers about buying it. People who make a hobby of heirloom china must meekly overlook snubs, and this particular person had never seen anything she coveted so much as that grape jug.

The Old Lady had torn the card to pieces; but she remembered the name and address. She went to the cupboard and took down the beloved jug.

“I never thought to part with it,” she said wistfully, “but Sylvia must have a dress, and there is no other way. And, after all, when I’m gone, who would there be to have it? Strangers would get it then–it might as well go to them now. I’ll have to go to town to-morrow morning, for there’s no time to lose if the party is Friday night. I haven’t been to town for ten years. I dread the thought of going, more than parting with the jug. But for Sylvia’s sake!”

It was all over Spencervale by the next morning that Old Lady Lloyd had gone to town, carrying a carefully guarded box. Everybody wondered why she went; most people supposed she had become too frightened to keep her money in a black box below her bed, when there had been two burglaries over at Carmody, and had taken it to the bank.