Dow,
all went out to the field together. Aunt Lavina labored slowly up the
yard, carrying a light splint-bottomed kitchen chair and her
knitting-work, and sat near the stone wall on a gentle rise, where she
could see the pond and the green country, and exchange a word with her
friends as they came and went up and down the rows. Betsey vouchsafed
a word now and then about Mrs. Strafford, but you would have thought
that she had been suddenly elevated to Mrs. Strafford's own cares and
the responsibilities attending them, and had little in common with her
old associates. Mrs. Dow and Peggy knew well that these high-feeling
times never lasted long, and so they waited with as much patience as
they could muster. They were by no means without that true tact which
is only another word for unselfish sympathy.
The strip of corn land ran along the side of a great field; at the
upper end of it was a field-corner thicket of young maples and walnut
saplings, the children of a great nut-tree that marked the boundary.
Once, when Betsey Lane found herself alone near this shelter at the
end of her row, the other planters having lagged behind beyond the
rising ground, she looked stealthily about, and then put her hand
inside her gown, and for the first time took out the money that Mrs.
Strafford had given her. She turned it over and over with an
astonished look: there were new bank-bills for a hundred dollars.
Betsey gave a funny little shrug of her shoulders, came out of the
bushes, and took a step or two on the narrow edge of turf, as if she
were going to dance; then she hastily tucked away her treasure, and
stepped discreetly down into the soft harrowed and hoed land, and
began to drop corn again, five kernels to a hill.
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