n the
platform, with their baggage around them. They did not talk much;
even Mrs. Babcock looked serious and contemplative in this momentary
lull. Their thoughts reached past and beyond them to the homes they
had left, and the new scenes ahead.

When the whistle of the train sounded they all stood up, and grasped
their valises tightly. Mrs. Green looked toward the coming train; her
worn face under her black bonnet, between its smooth curves of gray
hair, had all the sensitive earnestness which comes from generations
of high breeding. She was, on her father's side, of a race of old New
England ministers.

"Well, I dunno but I've been pretty faithful, an' minded my household
the way women are enjoined to in the Scriptures; mebbe it's right for
me to take this little vacation," she said, and her serious eyes were
full of tears.

Chapter VIII

When Jane Field, in her assumed character, had lived three months in
Elliot, she was still unsuspected. She was not liked, and that made
her secret safer. She was full of dogged resolution and audacity. She
never refused to see a caller nor accept an invitation, but people
never called upon her nor invited her when they could avoid it, and
thus she was not so often exposed to contradictions and
inconsistencies which might have betrayed her. Elliot people not only
disliked her, they were full of out-spoken indignation against her.
The defiant, watchful austerity which made her repel when she
intended to encourage their advances had turned them against her, but
more than that her supposed ill-treatment of her orphan niece.

When Lois, the third week of her stay in Elliot, had gone to a
dressmaker and asked for some sewing to do, the news was well over
the village by night. "That woman, who has all John Maxwell's money,
is too stingy and mean to support her niece, and she too delicate to
work," people said. The dressmaker to whom Lois appealed did not for
a minute hesitate to give her work, although she had already many
women sewing for her, and she had just given some to Mrs. Maxwell's
daughter Flora.

"There!" said she, when Lois had gone out. "I ain't worth five
hundred dollars in the world, I don't know how she'll sew, and I
didn't need any extra help--it's takin' it right out of my pocket,
likely as not--but I couldn't turn off a cat that looked up at me the
way that child did. She looks pinched. I don't believe that old woman
gives her enough to eat. Of all the mea