"There is nothing but this to say," he answered, very quietly, but in a voice that silenced her; "I would give my right hand—my life—everything—if I could persuade Myron Holder to marry me."
So he left her; but his mother's incredulous exclamation, "You'll never marry her!" cankered in his heart like a bitter prophecy.
Afterwards, when Mrs. Wilson thought over all the days and doings of her son, she thought of this also, and told the conversation to her neighbors, and they all then looked upon Myron Holder as one who, having gotten a man's soul, would not let him assoil himself by marrying her.
But this was after.
The old rag peddler going his rounds stopped once more at Mrs. Deans' door. Little My trotted out from the kitchen, and the old peddler eyed him with the longing gaze of a childless man. Mrs. Deans bargained for her pie-plates, and My stood gazing reflectively at the big black horse.
"Say, Mrs. Deans," said the ragman, "whose young one is that?"
"Oh," answered Mrs. Deans, feelingly, "that's Myron Holder's brat!"
"You don't say! Well, 'taint much like the Holders. I knowed Jed," he added, after a pause.
That night the ragman drove home, his van heavily laden, and his wife helped him to bestow the canvas sacks in the barn, and later looked over his stock of tins and ran over the book. She was a queer little figure. Her dress was of dark woollen stuff that they gave her husband at the shoddy-mills. It was curiously and lavishly adorned with buttons: there were rows of buttons on the sleeves from wrist to elbow, a veritable breast-plate of them on the bodice; they jingled on her shoulders and glistened on her skirts.
In a deep-down corner of her miserly little soul there lurked a taste for finery. Denied legitimate expression by her miserliness, it found vent in this barbaric adorning of her gowns. The pearl and crockery buttons she did not use—those she sewed on cards to resell; but all the fancy metal ones she found on the rags, being unsalable, she appropriated toward the decoration of her penurious person, and let her fancy run riot in the arrangement of them.