“What the widow gave,” said Nora, “she gave off her own poor back, and therefore was very cold. She gave it out of her own poor mouth, and was very hungry afterwards in consequence. I have given my two pounds, but I shall not be cold or hungry. I wish I was a widow with two mites! only, the question is whether I should not keep them for my own back after all, and thus gain nothing by the move.”
“As to that,” replied her aunt, “I cannot speak. But the widowhood and the two mites are there for us all, if we choose to make use of them.”
“In these days,” said Bob, “the widows with two mites should not be troubled at all. We can do it all without them, if we go to work properly.”
“If you had read your Bible properly, Sir,” said Mrs. Granger, “you would understand that the widows would not thank you for the exemption.”
“I don’t want the widows to thank me. I only want to live, and allow others to live according to the existing circumstances of the world.” It was manifest from Bob’s tone that he regarded his mother as little better than an old fogey.
In January, Nora was to become Mrs. Frederic F. Frew, and be at once taken away to new worlds, new politics, and new loves and hatreds. Like a true, honest-hearted girl as she was, she had already become half an American in spirit. She was an old Union American, and as such was strong against the South; and in return for her fervour in that matter, her future husband consented to abstain from any present loud abuse of things English, and generously allowed her to defend her own country when it was abused. This was much as coming from an American. Let us hope that the same privilege may be accorded to her in her future home in Philadelphia. But in the meantime, during these last weeks of her girlhood, these cold, cruel weeks of desperate want, she strove vigorously to do what little might be in her power for the poor of the country she was leaving. All this want had been occasioned by the wretched rebels of the South.
This was her theory. And she was right in much of this. Whether the Americans of the South are wretched or are rebels we will not say here; but of this there can be no doubt, that they created all the misery which we then endured.
“But I have no way of making myself a widow,” she said again. “Uncle Robert would not let me give away the cloak he gave me the other day.”
“He would have to give you another,” said Mrs. Granger.
“Exactly. It is not so easy, after all, to be a widow with two mites!”