“You are just as good as you can be about this, Mr. Farnshaw, but—but a coat like the other girls have will cost at least eight or ten dollars.” She felt his attitude.
The amount named took the man’s breath. He had given all he had and yet this woman, whom he had begun to like again, was not satisfied!
“A man can’t do no more’n he can, an’ that’s th’ last red cent I’ve got,” he replied, humiliated at the necessity of the confession.
“Oh! I’m so sorry,” Aunt Susan exclaimed, really so at having forced the statement. She sat with her brows knit in serious thought a moment, and a light began to break in upon her. Elizabeth had to have that wrap somehow and here was a way right before her. She remembered a long cape she had noticed going down the street that very morning.
“I guess we can make it do,” she said hesitantly. She was thinking out her plan and spoke slowly. “We’ll just make a cloak ourselves. We can do it.”
Josiah Farnshaw left the next day for home, in a good humour with himself and his munificence, but on the way home remembered Susan Hornby’s hesitancy and later decision to make the cloak herself, and the worm of suspicion began to gnaw again.
“If that woman could make something that’d do, what’d she ask for one of them expensive coats for?” he asked himself. “I guess it’s only th’ girl that figures in that deal! I ain’t nothin’ but th’ oats she feeds on nohow,” he reflected, and having once given the thought lodgment it grew and became the chief stone of the corner.
Our own comes to us, and Josiah Farnshaw had formed the habit of that kind of thinking. He felt that he was being robbed, and forgot that his daughter was being befriended, and out of his trip to Topeka got only a sour distaste for the woman he could clearly see was going to encourage the child in extravagance. He had never spent so much money on the entire family in a winter as he had done on that girl, and yet it wasn’t enough. “He’d bet he’d never give ’er another year’s schoolin’. She’d come home an’ get a summer school—that’s what she’d do. All folks thought about nowadays was clothes!”
To Elizabeth Farnshaw every day of that busy month was full of unconscious growth. As soon as Mr. Farnshaw was out of sight, Mrs. Hornby said to Elizabeth:
“Now, my child, I am going to take up the seams in that basque.”