"No."
"Why do you wear it, then?" asked Ruth, wonderingly.
"Because I cannot afford to buy another!"
Rebecca Frayne said this in so tense a voice that Ruth was fairly staggered. The girl of the Red Mill gazed upon the other's flaming face for a full minute without making any reply. Then, faintly, she said:
"I—I didn't understand, Rebecca. We none of us do, I guess. You came here in such style! That heavy trunk and those bags——"
"All out of our attic," said the other, sharply. "Did you think them filled with frocks and furbelows? See here!"
Ruth had already noticed the packages of papers piled along one wall of the room. Rebecca pointed to them.
"Out of our attic, too," she said, with a scornful laugh that was really no laugh at all. "Old papers that have lain there since the Civil War."
"But, Rebecca——"
"Why did I do it?" put in the other, in the same hard voice. "Because I was a little fool. Because I did not understand.