d carefully
closed her bedroom door. "With this and what I am to get, I believe I
could buy the bank, and yet I can only sit here and try to think of some
place to hide this dangerous piece of paper."

The draft was drawn by a San Francisco house upon a Boston bank, and Edna
had suggested that it might be well for Mrs. Cliff to open an account in
the latter city. But the poor lady knew that would never do. A
bank-account in Boston would soon become known to the people of Plainton,
and what was the use of having an account anywhere if she could not draw
from it? Edna had not failed to reiterate the necessity of keeping the
gold discovery an absolute secret, and every word she said upon this
point increased Mrs. Cliff's depression.

"If it were only for a fixed time, a month or three months, or even six
months," the poor lady said to herself, "I might stand it. It would be
hard to do without all the things I want, and be afraid even to pay the
money I borrowed to go to South America, but if I knew when the day was
certainly coming when I could hold up my head and let everybody know just
what I am, and take my proper place in the community, then I might wait.
But nobody knows how long it will take the captain to get away with that
gold. He may have to make ever so many voyages. He may meet with wrecks,
and dear knows what. It may be years before they are ready to tell me I
am a free woman, and may do what I please with my own. I may die in
poverty, and leave Mr. Cliff's nephews to get all the good of the draft
and the money in my trunk up-stairs. I suppose they would think it came
from Valparaiso, and that I had been hoarding it. It's all very well for
Edna. She is going to Europe, where Ralph will be educated, I suppose,
and where she can live as she pleases, and nobody will ask her any
questions, and she need not answer them, if they should. But I must stay
here, in debt, and in actual want of the comforts of life, making believe
to pinch and to save, until a sea-captain thousands and thousands of
miles away shall feel that he is ready to let me put my hand in my pocket
and spend my riches."

CHAPTER XXIX

A COMMITTEE OF LADIES

It was about a week after the receipt of Edna's letter that Willy Croup
came to Mrs. Cliff's bedroom, where that lady had been taking a
surreptitious glance at her Californian blankets, to tell her that there
were three ladies down in the parlor who wished to see her.

"It's the mi