Jessica smiled faintly, but sat for a long time silent. The talkative woman in the rocker also kept silence, brooding over many things. Finally she burst forth:
“I don’t see why it is that just as soon as a body gets into smooth sailing, along comes a storm and upsets things again. There was your mother, beginning to feel she could go ahead and do what her husband wanted to, and now here’s this bad feeling among her trusted hired men. Suspicion is the pisenest yarb that grows. The folks that could 16 suspect old ‘Forty-niner’ of wrong things’ll be plumb ready to watch out for one another. Somebody’ll be caught nappin’, sure. ’Tisn’t in human natur’ to walk upright all the time, and it’s foolish to expect it. But––shouldn’t wonder if I’d be the next one accused. And it comin’ Christmas time too. Land! I’m so bestead I’ve sewed that patch in wrong side up. What? Hey? You laughin’? I don’t see anything funny in this business, myself,” said the old lady, fretfully.
“You would if you could look in a glass! Your face is all streaked purple and green, where you cried on your patch,” explained Jessica, whose grief had changed to amusement.
“You don’t say! I knew them colors’d run. John fetched the piece from Marion, last time he went for the mail. Of the two stores there, I don’t know which is the worst. Their ‘Merrimac’ won’t wash, and their flannel shrinks, and their thread breaks every needleful. But, to ‘Boston’––dear me! Whatever did make me think of that place! Now I’ve thought, it’ll stick in my mind till it drives me wild––or back there, and that’s about the same thing. To go live with that slimsy cousin of mine, after being in the same house with your mother, is like falling off a roof into a squashy mud puddle. That’s all the sense and substance there is to Sarah, that was a Harrison before she was a Ma’sh. I warrant she’s clean out of medicine an money, for she’s a regular squanderer when it comes to makin’ rag rugs. I wish you could see ’em! I just wish’t you could. Such dogs and cats as she weaves into ’em would have druv’ Noah plumb crazy if he had to take ’em into the Ark. Their eyes are just round rings of white, with another round ring of black in the middle–––”
“Aren’t rings always round, auntie, dear?”
“No, they ain’t. Not after they’ve been trod on!” was the swift retort, as the old lady pointed downwards toward the floor of the porch.
Both stooped and rose again, astonishment deepening upon their faces as Jessica held out her open palm with the injured trinket lying upon it.
“Elsa Winkler’s wedding ring! How came it here?”
“How indeed? I don’t believe that woman’s been on these premises since I came.”