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“She never’d put on her good clothes to drownd herself,” said the widow. “She might have thought ’twas good as takin’ ’em with her, though. Old folks has wandered off an’ got lost in the woods afore now.”

Mrs. Dow and Peggy resented this impertinent remark, but deigned to take no notice of the speaker. “She wouldn’t have wore her best clothes to the Centennial, would she?” mildly inquired Peggy, bobbing her head toward the ceiling. “‘Twould be a shame to spoil your best things in such a place. An’ I don’t know of her havin’ any money; there’s the end o’ that.”

“You’re bad as old Mis’ Bland, that used to live neighbor to our folks,” said one of the old men. “She was dreadful precise; an’ she so begretched to wear a good alapaca dress that was left to her, that it hung in a press forty year, an’ baited the moths at last.”

“I often seen Mis’ Bland a-goin’ in to meetin’ when I was a young girl,” said Peggy Bond approvingly. “She was a good-appearin’ woman, an’ she left property.”

“Wish she’d left it to me, then,” said the poor soul opposite, glancing at her pathetic row of children: but it was not good manners at the farm to deplore one’s situation, and Mrs. Dow and Peggy only frowned. “Where do you suppose Betsey can be?” said Mrs. Dow, for the twentieth time. “She didn’t have no money. I know she ain’t gone far, if it’s so that she’s yet alive. She’s b’en real pinched all the spring.”

“Perhaps that lady that come one day give her some,” the keeper’s wife suggested mildly.

“Then Betsey would have told me,” said Mrs. Dow, with injured dignity.

VI.

On the morning of her disappearance, Betsey rose even before the pewee and the English sparrow, and dressed herself quietly, though with trembling hands, and stole out of the kitchen door like a plunderless thief. The old dog licked her hand and looked at her anxiously; the tortoise-shell cat rubbed against her best gown, and trotted away up the yard, then she turned anxiously and came after the old woman, following faithfully until she had to be driven back. Betsey was used to long country excursions afoot. She dearly loved the early morning; and finding that there was no dew to trouble her, she began to follow pasture paths and short cuts across the fields, surprising here and there a flock of sleepy sheep, or a startled calf that rustled out from the bushes. The birds were pecking their breakfast from bush and turf; and hardly any of the wild inhabitants of that rural world were enough alarmed by her presence to do more than flutter away if they chanced to be in her path. She stepped along, light-footed and eager as a girl, dressed in her neat old straw bonnet and black gown, and carrying a few belongings in her best bundle-handkerchief, one that her only brother had brought home from the East Indies fifty years before. There was an old crow perched as sentinel on a small, dead pine-tree, where he could warn friends who were pulling up the sprouted corn in a field close by; but he only gave a contemptuous caw as the adventurer appeared, and she shook her bundle at him in revenge, and laughed to see him so clumsy as he tried to keep his footing on the twigs.

“Yes, I be,” she assured him. “I’m a-goin’ to Pheladelphy, to the Centennial, same’s other folks. I’d jest as soon tell ye’s not, old crow;” and Betsey laughed aloud in pleased content with herself and her daring, as she walked along. She had only two miles to go to the station at South Byfleet, and she felt for the money now and then, and found it safe enough. She took great pride in the success of her escape, and especially in the long concealment of her wealth. Not a night had passed since Mrs. Strafford’s visit that she had not slept with the roll of money under her pillow by night, and buttoned safe inside her dress by day. She knew that everybody would offer advice and even commands about the spending or saving of it; and she brooked no interference.