“You aren’t living here yet, are you?” asked Mrs. Dix. “I understood Mrs. Solomon Black to say you weren’t going to leave her for awhile yet.”
“No; I shall be there nights and Sundays till everything is finished here,” said Lydia. “Mrs. Black makes me very comfortable.”
“Well, I think most of us ladies had ought to give you a vote of thanks on account of feeding the men-folks, noons,” put in Mrs. Dodge. “It saves a lot of time not to have to look after a dinner-pail.”
“Mother,” interrupted Fanny in a thin, sharp voice, quite unlike her own, “you know Jim always comes home to his dinner.”
“Well, what if he does; I was speaking for the rest of th’ women,” said Mrs. Dodge. “I’m sure it’s very kind of Miss Orr to think of such a thing as cooking a hot dinner for all those hungry men.”
Mrs. Dodge had received a second check from the assignees that very morning from the sale of the old bank building, and she was proportionately cheerful and content.
“Well; if this isn’t handsome!” cried Mrs. Dix, pausing in the hall to look about her. “I declare I’d forgotten how it used to look. This is certainly better than having an old ruin standing here. But, of course it brings back old days.”
She sighed, her dark, comely face clouding with sorrow.
“You know,” she went on, turning confidentially to Lydia, “that dreadful bank failure was the real cause of my poor husband’s death. He never held up his head after that. They suspected at first he was implicated in the steal. But Mr. Dix wasn’t anything like Andrew Bolton. No; indeed! He wouldn’t have taken a cent that belonged to anybody else—not if he was to die for it!”
“That’s so,” confirmed Mrs. Dodge. “What Andrew Bolton got was altogether too good for him. Come right down to it, he wasn’t no better than a murderer!”