k; she always helped with the
housework,--a thin, sorry, bad-tempered-looking poor soul, whom grief
had sharpened instead of softening. "I expect you feel too fine to set
with common folks," she said enviously to Betsey.

"Here I be a-settin'," responded Betsey calmly. "I don' know's I
behave more unbecomin' than usual." Betsey prided herself upon her
good and proper manners; but the rest of the company, who would have
liked to hear the bit of morning news, were now defrauded of that
pleasure. The wrong note had been struck; there was a silence after
the clatter of knives and plates, and one by one the cheerful town
charges disappeared. The bean-picking had been finished, and there was
a call for any of the women who felt like planting corn; so Peggy
Bond, who could follow the line of hills pretty fairly, and Betsey
herself, who was still equal to anybody at that work, and Mrs. Dow,
all went out to the field together. Aunt Lavina labored slowly up the
yard, carrying a light splint-bottomed kitchen chair and her
knitting-work, and sat near the stone wall on a gentle rise, where she
could see the pond and the green country, and exchange a word with her
friends as they came and went up and down the rows. Betsey vouchsafed
a word now and then about Mrs. Strafford, but you would have thought
that she had been suddenly elevated to Mrs. Strafford's own cares and
the responsibilities attending them, and had little in common with her
old associates. Mrs. Dow and Peggy knew well that these high-feeling
times never lasted long, and so they waited with as much patience as
they could muster. They were by no means without that true tact which
is only another word for unselfish sympathy.

The strip of corn land ran along the side of a great field; at the
upper end of it was a field-corner thicket of young maples and walnut
saplings, the children of a great nut-tree that marked the boundary.
Once, when Betsey Lane found herself alone near this shelter at the
end of her row, the other planters having lagged behind beyond the
rising ground, she looked stealthily about, and then put her hand
inside her gown, and for the first time took out the money that Mrs.
Strafford had given her. She turned it over and over with an
astonished look: there were new bank-bills for a hundred dollars.
Betsey gave a funny little shrug of her shoulders, came out of the
bushes, and took a step or two on the narrow edge of turf, as if she
were going to dance