“I rather guess it is,” agreed Fanny, happily, “and I don't s'pose it cost half so much. I dare say that mat on her hearth cost as much as all our plush furniture and the carpet, and it is a dreadful dull, homely thing.”
“Yes, it is,” said Ellen.
“I wish I'd been able to keep my hands as white as Miss Lennox's, an' I wish I'd had time to speak so soft and slow,” said Fanny, wistfully. Then Ellen had her by both shoulders, and was actually shaking her with a passion to which she very seldom gave rein.
“Mother,” she cried—“mother, you know better, you know there is nobody in the whole world to me like my own mother, and never will be. It isn't being beautiful, nor speaking in a soft voice, nor dressing well, it's the being you—you. You know I love you best, mother, you know, and I love my own home best, and everything that is my own best, and I always will.” Ellen was almost weeping.
“You silly child,” said Fanny, tenderly. “Mother knows you love her best, but she wishes for your sake, and especially since you are going to have advantages that she never had, that she was a little different.”
“I don't, I don't,” said Ellen, fiercely. “I want you just as you are, just exactly as you are, mother.”
Fanny laughed tearfully, and rubbed her coarse black head against Ellen's lovingly with a curious, cat-like motion, then bade her run away or she would not get her dress done. A dressmaker was coming for a whole week to the Brewster house to make Ellen's outfit. Mrs. Zelotes had furnished most of the materials, and Andrew was to pay the dressmaker. “You can take a little more of that money out of the bank,” Fanny said. “I want Ellen to go looking so she won't be ashamed before the other girls, and I don't want Cynthia Lennox thinking she ain't well enough dressed, and we ought to have let her do it. As for being beholden to her for Ellen's clothes, I won't.”
“I rather guess not,” said Andrew, but he was sick at heart. Only that afternoon the man from whom he had borrowed the money to buy Ellen's watch and chain had asked him for it. He had not a cent in advance for his weekly pay; he could not see where the money for Ellen's clothes was coming from. It was long since the “Golden Hope” had been quoted in the stock-list, but the next morning Andrew purchased a morning paper. He had stopped taking one regularly. He put on his spectacles, and spread out the paper in his shaking hands, and scrutinized the stock-list eagerly, but he could not find what he wanted. The “Golden Hope” had long since dropped to a still level below all record of fluctuations. A young man passing to his place at the bench looked over his shoulder. “Counting up your dividends, Brewster?” he asked, with a grin.
Andrew folded up the paper gloomily and made no reply.
“Irish dividends, maybe,” said the man, with a chuckle at his own wit, and a backward roll of a facetious eye.