"Hi! steady there, Zuba. Keep your eye on the compa.s.s. You're gettin'

off the course again. Annette--Mrs. Black, I mean--came to see Mrs.

Dott; that's plain sailin' so far. What happened after that?"

"Why, they went off together in the automobile and Serena said to tell you she had to go to lodge, and she'd be back when she could and not to wait supper. That's all I know."

The captain finished his lonely meal and returned to the store, where he found Abel Blount's wife and their twin boys, aged eight, waiting to negotiate for rubber boots. The boots were for the boys, but Mrs. Blount did the buying and it was a long and talky process. At last, however, the youngsters were fitted and clumped proudly away, bearing their leather shoes in their hands. It was a dry evening, but to separate the twins from those rubber boots would have been next door to an impossibility.

"There!" exclaimed the lady, as she bade the captain good night, "that's done; that much is settled anyhow. I'm thankful I ain't got four twins, instead of two, Cap'n Dott."

Daniel, entering the sale in the ledger, was thankful also. If the lengthy Blount account had been settled he would have been still more so.

At nine o'clock he and Sam locked up, extinguished the lamps, and closed the Metropolitan Store for the night. Crossing the yard to the house, which he entered by the front door, he found Serena in the sitting-room.

She was reclining upon the couch. She was tired, and out of sorts.

"Oh, dear!" she exclaimed, acknowledging her husband's greeting with a nod, "I am just about worn out, Daniel."

"I should think you would be, Serena. You've been makin' tracks between here and that lodge room all to-day and yesterday, too. I should think you'd be about dead."

"It isn't that. I don't mind the work. It's the thanklessness of it all that breaks me down. I give my time and effort to help the lodge, and what does it amount to?"

"Well, I--I give in that it don't seem to me to amount to much, 'cordin'

to my figurin'. I don't care much for lodge meetin's and sociables and such, myself. I'd rather have one evenin' at home with you than the whole cargo of 'em."

This statement was frank, but it was decidedly undiplomatic. Serena sniffed contempt.

"Of course you would!" she said. "I don't get a bit of encouragement here at home, either. I should think you'd be proud to have your wife the head of the Chapter, presiding at meetings and welcoming the visiting delegates and--and all."

"I am," hastily. "I'm proud of you, Serena. Always have been, far's that goes. But I'm just as proud of you here in this sittin'-room as I am when you're back of that pulpit, poundin' with your mallet and tellin'

Alphy Ann Berry to 'come to order.' Notwithstanding that you're the only one can make her come--or go, either--unless she takes a notion. Why,"

with a chuckle, "it takes her husband half an hour to make her go home after meetin's over."

Mrs. Dott did not chuckle.

"You think it's a joke," she said. "I don't. It is the Berry woman and her kind that make me disgusted. I'm tired of them all. I'm tired of Trumet. I wish we were somewhere where I had an opportunity; somewhere where I might be appreciated."

"_I_ appreciate you, Serena."

Serena ignored the remark. "I wish we had never settled here," she went on. "I'd leave in a minute, if I could. I'd like to be in with nice people, cultivated people, intelligent, up-to-date society, where I could have a chance to go on and be somebody. I'd like to be a leader.

I could be. Annette says I would be in a city like Scarford. She says I 'have the faculty of the born leader.' All I lack is the opportunity."

Her husband sighed. He had heard all this before. Inwardly he wished Mrs. Black at Scarford, or China, or anywhere, provided it was not Trumet.

His wife heard the sigh. "There, Daniel," she said; "I won't be complaining. I try not to be. But," she hesitated, "there is one thing I'd like to ask, now that we've got your Aunt Lavinia's three thousand: Don't you suppose I could have some new clothes; I need at least two dresses right away."

"Why--why, I guess likely you could, Serena. Yes, course you can. You go see Sarah Loveland right off."

Miss Loveland was the Trumet dressmaker. At the mention of her name Serena shook her head.

"I don't want Sarah to make them, Daniel," she said. "Mrs. Black says the things she makes are awful old-fashioned; 'country,' she calls them."

Daniel snorted. "I want to know!" he exclaimed. "Well, I remember her husband when his ma used to make his clothes out of his dad's old ones. I don't know whether they was 'country' or not, but they were the dumdest things ever _I_ saw. Country, huh! Scarford ain't any Paris, is it? I never heard it was."

"Well, it isn't Trumet. No, Daniel, if we could afford it, I'd like to have these dresses made up in Boston, where Gertie gets hers. Mrs. Black often speaks of Gertie's gowns; she says they are remarkably stylish, considering."

"CONSIDERIN'! What does she mean by that?"

"Don't be cross. I suppose she meant considering that they were not as expensive as her own. DO you suppose I could go to that Boston dressmaker, Daniel?"

Captain Dan's reply was slow in coming. He hated to say no; in fact, he said it so seldom that he scarcely knew how. So he temporized.

"Well, Serena," he began, "I--I'd like to have you; you know that. If 'twasn't for the cost I wouldn't hesitate a minute."

"But we have that three thousand dollars."

"Well, we ain't got all of it. Or we shan't have it long. I was footin'

up what I owed--what the store owes, I mean--just now, and it come to a pretty high figure. Over twelve hundred, it was. That's GOT to be paid.

Then there's Gertie's schoolin' and her board. Course, I never tell her we ain't so well off as we were. You and I agreed she shouldn't know.

But it takes a lot of money and--"

Mrs. Dott sat up on the couch. Her eyes snapped. "Oh!" she cried; "money! money! money! It's always money! If only just once I had all the money I wanted, I should be perfectly happy. If I wouldn't GO IT!"

Steps sounded on the front porch, and the patent door bell clicked and clanged.

CHAPTER III

Next morning an astonishing rumor began to circulate through Trumet. It spread with remarkable quickness, and, as it spread, it grew. The Dotts had inherited money! The Dotts were rich! The Dotts were millionaires!

Captain Daniel's brother had died and left him fifty thousand dollars!

His brother's wife had died and left him a hundred thousand! It was not his brother's wife, but Serena's uncle who had died, and the inheritance was two hundred and fifty thousand at least. By the time the story reached Trumet Neck it seemed to be fairly certain that all the Dott relatives on both sides of the house had pa.s.sed away, leaving the sole survivors of the family all the money and property in the world, with a few trifling exceptions.

Captain Dan, coming in for dinner,--one must eat, or try to eat, even though the realities of life have been blown away, and one is moving in a sort of dream, with the fear of awakening always present--Captain Dan, coming into the house for dinner, expressed his opinion of Trumet gossip mongers.

"My heavens and earth, Serena!" he cried, sinking into his chair at the table, "am I me, or somebody else? Do I know what I'm doin' or what's happened to me, or don't I?"

Serena, a transformed, flushed, excited Serena, beamed at him across the table.

"I should hope you did, Daniel," she answered.

"Well, if _I_ do, then n.o.body else does, and if THEY do, I don't. I've heard of more dead relations this forenoon than I ever had alive. And yarns about 'em! and about you and me! My soul and body! Say, did you know you had a cousin-in-law in Californy?"

"I? In California? Nonsense!"

"No nonsense about it. You had one and he was a lunatic or a epileptic or an epizootic or somethin', and lived in a hospital or a palace or a jail, and he was worth four millions or forty, I forget which, and fell out of an automobile or out of a balloon or out of bed--anyhow, it killed him--and--"

"Daniel Dott! DON'T talk so idiotic!"

"Humph! that's nothin' to the idiocy that's been talked to me this forenoon. I've done nothin' for the last hour but say 'No' to folks that come tearin' in to unload lies and ask questions. And some of 'em was people you'd expect to have common sense, too. My head's kind of wobbly this mornin', after the shock that hit it last night, but it's a regular Dan'l Webster's alongside the general run of heads in this town. Aunt Laviny's will has turned Trumet into an asylum, and the patients are all runnin' loose."