AUNT JERUSHA had never heard of Charlie
Churchill, or dreamed of her niece's love affair,
and she sat milking Blossom, her pet cow, with
her skirts tucked up around her, and an old sun-bonnet
perched on her head, when the boy from Livonia station
came furiously round the corner of the church, and reined
up his panting, hard driven horse so suddenly, that Blossom,
frightened out of her usually grave, quiet mood, started
aside, and in so doing upset the pail, and came near upsetting
the highly scandalized woman, who, turning fiercely to
the boy, demanded what he wanted, and what he meant by
tipping over all that milk, which was as good as a quarter
right out of her pocket.

The boy, who knew the contents of the telegram, made
no reply with regard to the milk, except a prolonged whistle
as he saw the white liquid streaming along upon the ground,
and then glanced curiously at the tall, grim woman confronting
him so angrily.

“Here's a telegraph,” he said, “and there's two dollars to

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pay on it, 'cause I had to fetch it so far; and your nephew,
or niece, Edna, I forgot which, is dead, killed by the cars.”

At the mention of the price she must pay for that bit of
paper, Miss Pepper bristled at once, and began to revolve
the propriety of not taking it from the boy, who could not
compel her to pay for what she never received; but when,
boy-like, he blurted out the contents, making a great blunder,
and telling her Edna was dead, she grew whiter than
the milk which Tabby, her cat, was lapping at her feet, and
forgetting the two dollars leaned up against the fence, and
taking the telegram in her hands, began to question the boy
as to the when and how of the terrible catastrophe.

“Edna killed!” she gasped, and to do her justice, she
never thought of the piles of carpet-rags the girl was to have
cut that winter; for she had made up her mind to bring her
home when she went with her poultry to Canandaigua; but
she did think of the dreary look she had so often seen in the
young girl's face; of the tears, which Edna had shed so
plentifully when under discipline; and there arose in her heart
a wish that she had been less strict and exacting with the girl
who was said to be dead. “How came she near the cars to
get killed?” she asked, and the boy replied:

“Read for yourself, and you'll know all I do.”

It was growing dark, and Miss Pepper led the way into
the house, and bade the boy sit down while she hunted up a
tallow-candle and lighted it from a coal taken from the
hearth. There was certainly a tear on her hard face as she
blew the coal to a blaze, and the pain in her heart kept
growing until with the aid of the candle she read:

“Iona, October 8th, 18—.
“To Miss Jerusha Pepper:
“Allen's Hill, Ontario Co., N.Y.
(via Livonia Station.)

“There has been a railroad accident, and your niece

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Edna's husband was killed. They were married yesterday
morning in Buffalo.

“Edna's husband! Married yesterday morning in Buffalo!
What does it mean?” she exclaimed, forgetting the
dreary look, and the tears, and the harsh discipline, and in
her amazement seizing the boy by the collar, as if he had
been the offending Edna, and asking him again “what it
meant, and where he got that precious piece of news, and
who Edna's husband was, and how he knew it was true, and
if it was not, how he dared come there with such ridiculous
stuff and tip her milk over and charge her two dollars to
boot?”

She had come to herself by this time, and the milk and
the money were of more importance to her than the story,
which she believed was false; and she continued to shake
the boy until he twisted himself loose from her grasp and retreated
toward the door.

“Goll darn ye,” he said, “a pretty actin' woman you be,
with some of yer relations dead. What do I know about
it? Nothin', only it was telegraphed to the office this afternoon,
and they posted me off to once to tell you 'bout it.
I'll take the two dollars, or if you won't they'll send you a
writ to-morry;” and the boy, grown bold from the fact that
he was standing on the door-step and out of the vixen's
reach, began to whistle “Shoo Fly” with a great deal of
energy.

People like Miss Pepper usually have a great terror of a
writ, and without stopping to consider the probabilities of
the case, the good woman reluctantly counted out two dollars,
and handing them to the boy, bade him be off and
never darken her door again. Once alone, Miss Pepper
read and re-read the telegram, which gave her no further intelligence
than that first imparted to her. There had been

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a railroad accident out west and Edna's husband was killed.
What could it mean, and who was Edna's husband? Then
as she thought of Canandaigua and reflected that somebody
there knew something about it, she resolved upon going to
town on the morrow and ascertaining for herself what it all
was about. But the next morning was ushered in with a driving
rain, which came in under Miss Jerusha's front door, and
drove into the cellar and through that patch of old shingles
on the roof, and kept the old dame hurrying hither and
thither with mop, and broom, and pail, and drove Canandaigua
from her mind as utterly impracticable.

The next day, however, was tolerably clear; and having
borrowed a neighbor's horse, and arrayed herself in an old
water-proof cloak, with the hood over her head, she started
for town, where the news had preceded her, and produced
a state of wild excitement among the seminary girls, who
pounced upon Miss Pepper at once, each telling what she
knew, and sometimes far more than she knew. First, they
had heard that Charlie Churchill had run away from the
academy, then of the marriage in Buffalo, and then the last
evening's papers had brought the news of the fearful tragedy,
which changed the public feeling of blame into pity for poor
Edna. But Aunt Jerusha knew no pity. That four hundred
dollars which she must now pay for Edna's education precluded
the possibility of pity in a nature like hers, and she
felt only anger and resentment towards her luckless niece
who had thrown such a bill of expense upon her. Not that
the principal spoke of the bill so soon; he had no fears of
its being unpaid, and would have waited till a more fitting
time, before touching upon so delicate a point. It was
Miss Pepper herself who dragged in the subject and insisted
upon knowing about how much it was, even if she could not
know exactly, and showed so much bitterness that Mr. Stone
threw off fifty dollars and made it an even four hundred, and

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told her not to trouble herself, and a good deal more meant
to conciliate her.

But he might as well have talked to the wind, for any
effect his words had upon the excited woman. Everything
which it was possible to learn with regard to Charlie Churchill
she learned, and in her secret heart felt that if it had
turned out well, she should be a little proud of the Leighton
family; but it had not turned out well, and she expressed
herself so freely, that a few of the girls who had always been
envious of Edna, and Charlie's attentions to her, dropped a
hint of a rumor they had heard about some bill at Greenough's,
and forthwith the incensed Jerusha drove to the jeweller's,
and by dint of questioning and cross-questioning,
learned about the watch, and the coral, and the ring; then
hurrying back to the Seminary, she picked up the clothes
Edna had left, and cramming them into a little square hairtrunk
which had held Henry Browning's wardrobe when he
first went to college, carried it to the buggy by the gate, and
putting her feet upon it, drove back to the Hill in a state
of greater mental excitement than she had ever been in before.

Two days after Jack's letter came, telling her the particulars,
and saying “Mrs. Churchill sends her love and will write
herself when she is able. She is very sorry to make you
feel as badly as she knows you must, and hopes you will forgive
her.”

This letter, instead of conciliating Miss Pepper, threw
her into a greater rage than ever. This might have been
owing in part to the fact that she was suffering from an
attack of neuralgia, induced by a cold taken the day she
went to Canandaigua in Edna's behalf. Neuralgia is not
pleasant to bear at any time, and Miss Pepper did not bear
it pleasantly, and looked more like a scarecrow than a human
being as she crouched before the fire, with her false teeth

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out, a hasty pudding poultice on her face, a mustard paste on
the back of her neck, and an old woollen shawl pinned over
her head to keep it warm.

“Mrs. Churchill! Mrs. Fiddlesticks! That chit of a
child,” she said, when she finished reading Jack Heyford's
letter, “sends her love, and is sorry, and hopes I'll forgive
her! Stuff! I hope I won't! Brought up religiously as she
was, confirmed and all that, and then ran away with a beggar
who breaks his neck. No, I shan't forgive her; leastwise
not for a spell. She ought to suffer awhile, and she
needn't think to wheedle me into asking her home right
away. By and by, when she is punished enough, I may take
her back, but not now. She has made her bed and must lie
in it.”

This was Miss Pepper's decision, and taking advantage of
a few minutes when her face was easier, she commenced a
letter to Edna, berating her soundly for what she had done,
telling her she could not expect her friends to stand by her
when she disgraced herself by “marrying a man or boy who
did not own so much as the shirt on his back, and who was
mean enough to buy a lot of jewelry and never pay for it.
Greenough told me about the watch, and coral, and ring,
and he's going to send the bill to Mr. Leighton. I should
think you'd feel smart wearing the jimcraks. Yes, I should.”

Edna was better when the letter came to her, and the
world did not look one half so dreary as it had done when
viewed from her sick bed in that little front room of Mrs.
Dana's. For the first time since the accident, she had given
some thought to her toilet, and had brushed and arranged her
beautiful hair, and thought of Charlie with a keen throb of
pain as she wound round her fingers the long curls he used
so to admire. Edna was proud of her hair, which so many
people called beautiful, but which Aunt Jerusha had set herself
so strongly against. Twice had that maiden's scissors

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been in dangerous proximity to the mass of golden brown,
but something in the girl's piteous expression had reminded
her of the dead man under the shadow of the cherry-trees,
and the curls had not been harmed. Edna thought of Aunt
Jerusha now, as she shook back the shining ringlets, which
rippled all round her neck and shoulders, and with the
thought came a desire to know what that worthy woman
would say, and a wonder as to why she did not write. She
was beginning to long for some expression with regard to her
conduct, even though it should be anything but commendatory.
She knew she would be blamed; she deserved it, she
thought, but she was not quite prepared for the harsh tone
of Aunt Jerusha's letter, and she felt for a moment as if her
heart would burst with a sense of the injustice done to her.

One piece of information which the letter contained hurt
her cruelly, and that was the news concerning the jewelry,
which Roy Leighton must pay for, even to her wedding ring
which she clutched at first with an impulse to tear it from
her finger and thrust it from her forever. But the solemn
words—“With this ring I thee wed”—sounded again in her
ears, and brought back that hour when she stood at Charlie's
side, loving him, believing in him, trusting him implicitly.
She did not ask herself how much of that faith, and trust,
and love was gone; she dared not do that, for fear of what
the answer might be. Charlie was dead, and that was enough;
and she wrung her hands helplessly and looked at the ring,
the seal of her marriage, but could not take it off then, even
though Roy Leighton must pay for it. She wrote to him
again that very day, with what sore heart and utter humiliation
we have seen in her letter to him, but with a firm determination
to do what she promised him she would do, namely:
liquidate her indebtedness to him and arrange if possible with
the jeweller.

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“I must go to work now,” she said to herself. “I can be
idle no longer.”

But what to do, and where to seek employment in that
city, where she was an utter stranger, was the point which
puzzled her greatly; and when Jack Heyford came next to
see her, she told him of her plans and asked him for advice.
Had he been rich, Jack would have offered to pay her debts
and make her free from want, for never was there a more
generous, unselfish heart than that which beat under his old
worn coat. But Jack was not rich, and his salary, though
comparatively liberal, could not at present warrant any additional
expense to those he already had to meet; and when
she asked him if he knew of any scholars either in music or
drawing, which she would be likely to get, he replied that he
did know of one, and it would be just the thing for her, too,
and help to relieve the tedium of sitting all day long in her
chair, or reclining on the couch. Annie should take lessons
of Mrs. Churchill, and commence to-morrow, if that would
suit, and meantime he would inquire among his friends, and
tell them Edna's story.

And so it was arranged that Edna should go to little
Annie Heyford the next day, at two o'clock, and give her
first lesson in drawing.

“You will have no difficulty in finding your way,” Jack
said. “I would come for you myself, but might not be able
to leave the store at the hour.” Then, just before leaving,
he added: “Suppose you make it one, instead of two, and
lunch with Annie. That will please her vastly, she complains
of eating alone so often.”

As there was no special reason why Edna should decline
this invitation, she accepted it readily; and that night, just
as she was falling away to sleep, and dreaming that she had
more scholars than she could well manage, and that her debt
to Roy was nearly paid, Jack was conferring with old Luna
concerning the lunch of the next day.

p595-102

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