"John, do you hear that?" cried Mrs. John C., in high excitement. "That silver tea-set's gone. It's the one Ann sets her life by, an' it's wuth I dunno what. Can't you do suthin'?"
John C. looked about him with a vague solemnity.
"Anybody could git into these woods," he said, "an' you'd have hard work to find out where."
"Hard work!" repeated Mrs. John C., in extreme scorn. "I guess 't'll be hard work, but so's a good many things. Don't set there talkin'. Don't you worry, Ann! We'll stir up the neighbors, an' 'f your tea-set's anywheres above ground, we'll have it back, or I'll miss my guess. Come, John, come. Le' 's git along."
Power and vengeance breathed from all her portly frame, and so they drove away, she even, as Ann saw, in her dull bewilderment, putting out a hand to shake the whip in its socket, and John C. holding in the plunging colt.
Ann wearily tugged in the molasses-jug and put it in its place. Then she sat down by the window, trembling, not to think over what had happened, but to bear her loss as she might. From the first moment of discovering it, she had had no hope. Tragic things of this sort were strangers to her simple life, and now that one had come, she knew no depth of experience to draw from. Sickness she could bear, or death if it should come, because they were factors of the common lot; but it had never occurred to her that so resplendent a thing as a silver tea-set could belong to any one and then be reft away.
The dusk gathered and thickened. The frogs were peeping down by the old willows, and for the first time in her life the melancholy of early spring lay cold upon her heart. It was perhaps eight o'clock when she heard a hand at the door.
"Ann!" called Mrs. John C. "Ann, you there?"
"Come in," she said. "I'll light up."