Three thousand dollars! For the first time her inheritance assumed its monetary value before Thirza's eyes. Hitherto she had regarded it merely as an indefinite extent of pastures, woods, and swamps—but three thousand dollars! It sounded like a deal of money to her, who had never owned a hundred dollars at one time in her life, and her imagination immediately wandered off into fascinating vistas, which Jane's prosaic words had thrown open before her. She heard, as in a dream, the nasal, incisive voice as it went on with the catalogue of her possessions.
"Yes, it's worth three thousand dollars, if it's worth a cent! I heerd Squire Brooks a-tellin' Orthaniel Stebbins so at the funeral. An' then, here's the house. There ain't no comfortabler one on Joneses' Hill, nor one that has more good furnitoor an' fixin's in it. Then there's Aunt Abigail's clo'es an' things. Why, ter my sartain knowledge there's no less'n five real good dresses a-hangin' in the fore-chamber closet, ter say nothin' of the bureau full of under-clo'es an' beddin'." Jane did not think it necessary to explain by what means this "sartain knowledge" had been achieved, but continued: "There's a silk warp alpacky now, a-hangin' up there, why—it's e'en-a-most as good as new! The creases ain't out on't." (Unsophisticated Jane! not to know that the creases never do go out of alpaca.) "I don't see what in the name o' sense ye're a-goin' ter dew with all them dresses. It'll take ye a life-time ter wear 'em out. If I hed that silk warp alpacky now,"—she continued musingly, yet raising her voice so suddenly that Thirza started; "if I hed that are dress, I should take out two of the back breadths for an over-skirt—yes—an' gore the others!" This climax was delivered in triumphant tone. Then lowering her voice she continued, reflectively: "Aunt Abigail was jest about my build."
Thirza caught the import of the last words.
"Jane," said she, languidly, with an undertone of impatience in her voice (it was hard to be recalled from her pleasant wanderings by a silk warp alpaca!), "Jane, you can have it."
"Wh—what d'ye say?" inquired Jane, incredulously.
"I said you could have that dress; I don't want it," repeated Thirza.
Jane sat a moment in silence before she trusted herself to speak. Her heart was beating with delight, but she would not allow the smallest evidence of joy or gratitude to escape in word or look.
"Wall," she remarked, coolly, after a fitting pause, "ef you haint got no use for it, I might take it, I s'pose. Not that I'm put tew it for clo'es, but I allers did think a sight of Aunt Abigail——"
Her remarks were interrupted by an exclamation from Thirza. The front gate opened with a squeak and closed with a rattle and bang, and the tall form of Orthaniel Stebbins was seen coming up the path. Orthaniel was a mature youth of thirty. For length and leanness of body, prominence of elbow and knee joints, size and knobbiness of extremities, and vacuity of expression, Orthaniel would have been hard to match. He was attired in a well-preserved black cloth suit, with all the usual accessories of a rustic toilet. His garments seemed to have been designed by his tailor for the utmost possible display of the joints above mentioned, and would have suggested the human form with equal clearness, if buttoned around one of the sprawling stumps which were so prominent a feature in the surrounding landscape. On this particular occasion there was an air of importance, almost of solemnity, about his person, which, added to a complacent simper, born of a sense of the delicate nature of his present errand, produced in his usually blank countenance something almost amounting to expression.