“Thirty pounds! One hundred and fifty dollars!” Cornelia gasped in astonishment at the smallness of the sum. “You can’t mean that that includes everything—chairs and tables, and carpets, and dishes, and beds, and bureaus, and brooms, and tins, and curtains, and fire-irons—and all the fixing to put ’em up! It isn’t possible you can get them all for a hundred and fifty dollars!”
“You can, miss. There’s a shop in the Fore Street where they do you everything complete for three rooms for thirty pounds, with a velvet suite for the parlour. Lady’s chair, gent’s chair, sofa, and four uprights, with chiffonnier, and overmantel, and all. You couldn’t wish for anything better. The girl I lived with had only a few odd bits—I’d be ashamed to have such a poor sort of parlour.—In the kitchen they give you a dresser, and a flap-table, and linoleum on the floor. Jim and me went to the shop one day to have a look round. ... That was when he had a bit put by!” Mary sighed, and flicked away a tear. “And now you’re going next! I’m getting a bit sick of bad luck, I am!”
Cornelia was bending forward in her seat, her chin supported in the palms of her hands. Her expression was very grave and wistful, but in her eyes shone the light of awakened interest.
“Mury!—you’ve been real good and attentive to me. I guess I’ve given you quite a heap of trouble. I want to make you a present before I go. Would you like it if I fixed-up that house so’s you could get married right away? If you say so, you can go to that store and make your own bargains, and I’ll leave thirty pounds with Miss Ramsden to pay the bills. I’d like to feel I’d helped you to a home of your own, Mury!”
Mary clutched the back of a chair near to which she was standing; her eyes protruded, her chin dropped, speech failed her in the excess of emotion. She could only stare, and gasp, and stare again.
“Poor Mury!” said Cornelia, softly. “Are you so pleased? I want you should be pleased. If I ken make someone happy to-day—right-down, tearing happy, it’s going to help me more’n you know. ... Won’t you enjoy going shopping with your friend, Mury, bossing round in that store, choosing the things you want, and putting on airs as if you owned the bank? Mind you put on airs, Mury! Make ’em hop round, and get things to your taste. They’ll think the more of you, and it’s not every day one furnishes a house. ... I’ll send you my picture to stand on the mantelpiece in that parlour, and when you dust it in the mornings, you can send me a kind thought ’way over all those miles of ocean, and I’ll think of you sitting in the lady’s chair. ... For the land’s sake, girl, don’t have a fit! You don’t need to have a thing unless you say so!”
“Oh, Miss Cornelia!” sobbed Mary, brokenly. “You’re too—I’m so—you’re an angel, Miss Cornelia, that’s what you are! ... Jim will go off his head when he hears this.—It’s a sort of thing you can’t seem to believe.—I loved to wait on you, miss; if you’d never given me a thing I’d have loved it all the same—you talked so kind, and took such an interest, and was always so lively and laughing. It wasn’t for what I could get—but the house! ... To have a house thrown at you, as you may say, at a moment’s notice—it—takes away my breath! I can’t seem to take it in.”
“But you are happy, Mury? You feel happy to think of it?”
“I should think I do just. Clean dazed with happiness!”
“Poor Mury!” said Cornelia, again. She looked across the room at the flushed, ecstatic face of the prospective bride, and smiled with tender sympathy.