"Hetty—yer ain't yerself! Yer—"
"Yes, I am—I am! I'm always myself—there's never anything else I can be, Theron,—never!" And Hephzibah threw her apron over her head and ran from the room, crying bitterly.
"Well, by gum!" muttered the man, as he dropped heavily into the nearest chair.
For some days the picture stayed on the shelf over the kitchen sink, where it had been placed by Theron as the quickest means of its disposal. Hephzibah did not seem to notice it after that first day, and Theron was most willing to let the matter drop.
It must have been a week after the picture's arrival that the minister made his semi-yearly call.
"Oh, you have an Angelus! That's fine," he cried, appreciatively;—the minister always begged to stay in Hephzibah's kitchen, that room being much more to his mind than was the parlor, carefully guarded from sun and air.
"'Fine'!—that thing!" laughed Hephzibah.
"Aye, that thing," returned the man, quick to detect the scorn in her voice; then, with an appeal to the only side of her nature he thought could be reached, he added:
"Why, my dear woman, 'that thing,' as you call it, is a copy of a picture which in the original was sold only a few years ago for more than a hundred thousand dollars—a hundred and fifty, I think."
"Humph! Who could have bought it! That thing!" laughed Hephzibah again, and changed the subject. But she remembered,—she must have remembered; for, after the minister had gone, she took the picture from the shelf and carried it to the light of the window.