Charity looked it over carefully. “I can buy ’em like that for five cents at Jordan, Marsh’s.”
“Can you?” answered Hazel, trying not to be hurt. “And it took me days and days to make it.”
“Sure,” said Charity loftily, “didn’t I tell you it was slow down South?”
When Hazel took the same gift to her school-teacher, however, she heard a very different comment.
“You’ve done a wonderful thing, Hazel,” Miss Grey said. “You’ve followed an industry from its beginning to the finished product. Next year, if it is possible, we will get a spinning-wheel and loom and you can demonstrate the spinning and weaving to the school.”
Hazel repeated this to Charity.
“Bet you’d break your thread,” Charity declared, “when you had to spin before all the boys and girls.”
The homecoming was very exciting. There was the first Sunday at church, and the Sunday school service, when they wanted to hear about their song-books down in Alabama, and the good time at the Perkins’s and the trolley rides with Charity. Mr. Perkins gave Hazel a dollar for trolley rides, telling her that she must not forget the city and its delights.
June came, and one late afternoon Mrs. Tyler returned from her work looking so happy that Hazel accused her of having a secret.
Mrs. Tyler nodded assent. “You shall hear it after supper,” she said.