"Yes, Jim Ellison." Grannie Thornton sat up and shook a lean fist toward the window that opened off toward the hill. "Oh, he bought it all right. He paid for it, I suppose. But it's ours, by rights. We owned it all once, from Ten Mile Wood to the bridge. But it's gone now."
"I don't see why we don't own it now, if that's so," said the child.
"Well, it's law doin's," muttered the woman. "Get your own supper, and don't bother me."
"I don't understand," said the child, as she went back to the kitchen.
She might have understood better if Grannie Thornton had explained the real reason: that the Thorntons had gone wild and run through their farm property; mortgaged it and sold it out; and that Ellison, a shrewd buyer, had got it when it was to be had cheapest. But she asked one more question.
"Gran'" she said, peeping in at the door, "will we ever get it again, s'pose?"
"Mercy sakes, how do I know!" came the answer. "It's ours now, by rights. Will you ever stop talking?"
The child looked wonderingly out across the fields; seated herself by the window, and still gazed as she drank her coffee and ate her scanty supper. She was sitting there when night shut down and hid the hill and the brook from sight.
The sun, himself an early riser, was up not anywhere near so early next morning as was Bess Thornton. There was light in the east, but the sun had not begun to roll above the hill-tops when the child stole quietly out of bed, slipped into her few garments, and hurried barefoot, from the room where she and Grannie Thornton slept. The old woman was still slumbering heavily.
"I'll not ask that old Witham for anything for gran," she said. "I'll get her something,—and something she'll like, too. It all belongs to us, anyway, gran' said."