"I understand," said Jack, good-humoredly, in reply to an explanation from Miss Hildebrand. "You pay for just what you order, and no more, and they charge high for everything but bread. I'm beginning to learn something of city ways."
During all that morning, anybody who knew Jack Ogden would have had to look at him twice, he had been so quiet and sedate; but the old, self-confident look gradually returned during breakfast.
"Ve see you again at supper," said Mr. Guilderaufenberg, as they arose. "Den ve goes to Vashington. You valks out und looks about. You easy finds your vay back. Goot-bye till den."
Jack shook hands with his friends, and walked out into the street.
"Well, here I am!" he thought. "This is the city. I'm all alone in it, too, and I must find my own way. I can do it, though. I'm glad it's Sunday, so that I needn't go straight to work."
At that moment, the nine o'clock bells were ringing in two wooden steeples in the village of Crofield; but the bell of the third steeple was silent, down among the splinters of what had been the pulpit of its own meeting-house. The village was very still, but there was something peculiar in the quiet in the Ogden homestead. Even the children went about as if they missed something or were listening for somebody they expected.
There were nine o'clock bells, also, in Mertonville, and there was a ring at the door-bell of the house of Mr. Murdoch, the editor.
"Why, Elder Holloway!" exclaimed Mrs. Murdoch, when she opened the door. "Please to walk in."
"Thank you, Mrs. Murdoch, but I can't," he said, speaking as if hurried, "Please tell Miss Ogden there's a class of sixteen girls in our Sunday school, and the teacher's gone; and I've taken the liberty of promising for her that she'll take charge of it."
"I'll call her," said Mrs. Murdoch.