Well, yes, and my grief began to come (or rather I began to come to grief) last winter, when I first heard my family say the “city fathers” were going to “improve the street.” As we were a frame house, one story with basement kitchen, I feared, and my family feared, our room would be considered better than our company.
“And if they do pull the house down, where shall we go?” asked poor Mr. Dean, as they all sat about the sitting-room fireplace. He was always asking his wife “what they should do,” and she a sick woman, coughing there in her chair! But Mr. Dean has been a broken-down man ever since that affair of Dick’s, which I am about to relate.
There are three Dean children, John, Dick, and Nell. She—I mean Nell—has a voice like a harp, and I’ve heard it remarked that her hair is a trap to catch a sunbeam. Bless her, I always did my best to draw when she laid the coal on the grate! Her father never could understand why she had so much better luck than he had in making a fire!
John, the oldest, is married, and living in Boston. He has always paid his father’s rent, and the Deans have lived here ever since Dick was born. I think they had a life-lease. They could afford to laugh at their neighbors on moving day. Who’ll laugh now? I’m getting wheezy—thank you, little boy—put on more shingles, it warms my heart.
Where was I? O, speaking of the trouble. It is the family mystery, twelve months old; and the odd part of it is, that I know more about it than anyone else in the family.
A year ago, when Dick was attending the academy, he came home one night with a diamond ring on his forefinger.
“How splendid! Whose is it?” said Nell, who was making buttered toast for supper.
“That’s telling,” says Dick. “What if it’s my own?”
“Then it’s paste.”