lconies, and everything in it, but there is nobody on this earth who
could tempt me to live there."

"Now," said Mrs. Cliff to herself, as she turned from the window and
selected a fresh easy chair, and sank down into its luxurious depths,
"there is nothing in this world so delightful as to go back rich to
Plainton. To be rich in Paris or New York is nothing to me; it would
simply mean that I should be a common person there as I used to be at
home, and, for the matter of that, a little more common."

As the good lady's thoughts wandered northward, and spread themselves
from the railroad station at Plainton all over the little town, she was
filled with a great content and happiness to go to her old home with her
new money. This was a joy beyond anything she had dreamed of as possible
in this world.

But it was the conjunction of the two which produced this delightful
effect upon her mind. The money anywhere else, or Plainton without it,
would not have made Mrs. Cliff the happy woman that she was.

It pleased her to let her mind wander over the incidents of her recent
visit to her old home, the most unhappy visit she had ever made in all
her life, but everything that was unpleasant then would help to make
everything more delightful in the present home-coming.

She thought of the mental chains and fetters she had worn when she went
to Plainton with plenty of money in her purse and a beautiful pair of
California blankets in her handsome trunk; when she had been afraid to
speak of the one or to show the other; when she had sat quietly and
received charity from people whose houses and land, furniture, horses,
and cows, she could have bought and given away without feeling their
loss; when she had been publicly berated by Nancy Shott for spending
money on luxuries which should have been used to pay her debts; when she
had been afraid to put her money in the bank for fear it would act as a
dynamite bomb and blow up the fortunes of her friends, and when she
could find no refuge from the miseries brought upon her by the necessity
of concealing her wealth except to go to bed and cover up her head so
that she should not hear the knock of some inquiring neighbor upon her
front door.

Then when she had made this background as dark and gloomy as it was
possible to make it, she placed before it the glittering picture of her
new existence in Plainton.

But this new life, bright as it now appeared to her, was not to be begun
witho