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Then Amanda went into the house, and sat down by the window in the gathering dusk, surveying the wreckage of her dream. The dream was even more precious in that it had grown so old. Caleb was a part of her every-day life, and for fifteen years Saturday had brought a little festival, wherein the commonplace man with brown eyes had been high-priest. He would not come to-night. Perhaps he never would come again. She knew what it was to feel widowed.

Sunday passed; and though Caleb fed the pigs and did the barn-work as usual, he spoke but briefly. Even in his customary salutation of “How dee?” Amanda detected a change of tone, and thereafter took flight whenever she heard his step at the kitchen door. So Monday forenoon passed; Caleb brought water for her tubs and put out her clothes-line, but they had hardly spoken. The intangible monster of a misunderstanding had crept between them. But when at noon he asked as usual, though without looking at her, “Goin’ to Sudleigh with the butter to-day?” Amanda had reached the limit of her endurance. It seemed to her that she could no longer bear this formal travesty of their old relations, and she answered in haste,–

“No, I guess not.”

“Then you don’t want I should set with your mother?”

“No!” And again Caleb turned away, and plodded soberly off to young Nat’s.

“I guess I must be crazy,” groaned poor Amanda, as she changed her washing-dress for her brown cashmere. “The butter’s got to go, an’ now I shall have to harness, an’ leave ma’am alone. Oh, I wish Aunt Melissa’d never darkened these doors!”

Everything went wrong with Amanda, that day. The old horse objected to the bits, and occupied twenty minutes in exasperating protest; the wheels had to be greased, and she lost a butter-napkin in the well. Finally, breathless with exertion, she went in to bid her mother good-by, and see that the matches were hidden and the cellar door fastened.

“Now, ma’am,” she said, standing over the little old woman and speaking with great distinctness, “don’t you touch the stove, will you? You jest set right here in your chair till I come back, an’ I’ll bring you a good parcel o’ pep’-mints. Here’s your garter to knit on, an’ here’s the almanac. Don’t you stir now till I come.”

And so, with many misgivings, she drove away.

When, Amanda came back, she did not stay to unharness, but hurried up to the kitchen door, and called, “You all right, ma’am?” There was no answer, and she stepped hastily across the floor. As she opened the sitting-room door, a low moaning struck her ear. The old lady sat huddled together in, her chair, groaning at intervals, and looking fixedly at the corner of the room.

“O ma’am, what is it? Where be you hurt?” cried Amanda, possessed by an anguish of self-reproach. But the old lady only continued her moaning; and then it was that Amanda noticed her shrivelled and shaking fingers tightly clasped upon a roll of money in her lap.

“Why, ma’am, what you got?” she cried; but even as she spoke, the explanation flashed upon her, and she looked up at the corner of the room. The eight-day clock was gone.

“Here, ma’am, you let me have it,” she said, soothingly; and by dint of further coaxing, she pulled the money from the old lady’s tense fingers. There were nine dollars in crisp new bills. Amanda sat looking at them in unbelief and misery.

“O my!” she whispered, at length, “what a world this is! Ma’am, did you tell him he might have ’em?”

“I dunno what Jonathan’ll do without that clock,” moaned the old lady. “I see it carried off myself.”

“Did you tell him he might?” cried Amanda, loudly.

“I dunno but I did, but I never’d ha’ thought he’d ha’ done it. I dunno what time ’tis now;” and she continued her low-voiced lamenting.