But the dear woman could not quite forget that, though she was impatient to remove her children from dependence on Miss Keren, for the time they had no other home than the Ark. And it was a good home, however forlorn it had appeared at first. This discovery would have a decided, though indirect effect on her family fortunes.
[CHAPTER XIX]
DISPOSSESSION AND POSSESSION
"Well!" said Rosie when she heard the great news. "Well, if that hain't just like all I ever heard 'em tell of old Bittenbender! To go and hide the will, and then let it in a place where 'twould be sure to be found by whoever come here after him, so they'd have to stand the loss, or else be a big rascal like he was! I always heard 'em say old Bittenbender was the greatest scamp around here, but to hide the will, and then give the place he didn't own to pay his debt, and then let the will behind him, yet, where you'd be sure to find it, beats everything I ever heard."
"It looks as if the late unlamented Isaac Bittenbender enjoyed a joke of his own kind, though it isn't the sort to please all tastes in jokes," remarked Bob. "It is lucky for him that the will wasn't found while he still lived—it might have given him another sort of residence than the Ark."
"Well, it's a lucky thing for Gretta the farm come into honest hands, or the folks that found the will might have kept still about it and she'd never have been no wiser," remarked Rosie. "As 'tis, what you goin' to do about it?"
"Not that," said Laura, unnecessarily. "Don't you know, Rosie, how hard Aunt Keren tried to find the will, so she could give the place over to Gretta?"
"Why, you don't suppose I thought your Aunt Keren was a-goin' to keep it?" Rosie expostulated.
"We are going to have the will proved, admitted to probate, and we shall install Gretta as mistress of the Ark just as soon as we can possibly do so," said Miss Bradbury, smiling into Gretta's perturbed face. "Then we shall see what arrangement we can make with the owner by which we can stay on here for a time, instead of her living with us, but otherwise with no change of conditions. Did you ever see a girl so cast down by good fortune? Gretta, girl, pray look cheerful! Gaze out of the window at your own broad, snow-clad fields. Look around you at your own walls, and consider what a happy change this makes in the fortunes of a girl who has had nothing in all her life to call her own, not even a father's house! And now she is an independent farmer who, with a little help, can subsist off of her own good acres!"