it
all."

"Oh, Jerome, it isn't gone?"

"Yes, the gold is gone. Here is the bag it was in. The thief left
that. Suppose he thought he might be traced by it."

"Oh, poor father, poor father, what will he do!" moaned Elmira.

"He'll do nothing. He'll never know it," said Jerome.

"What do you mean?"

"Wait here a minute." Jerome went noiselessly out of the room and
up-stairs. He returned soon with a leathern bag, which he carried
with great caution. "I'm trying to keep this from jingling," he
whispered.

"Oh, Jerome, what is it?"

Jerome laughed and untied the mouth of the bag. "You must help me put
it into the other bag; every dollar will have to be counted out
separately."

"Oh, Jerome, is it money you've saved?"

"Yes; and don't you ever tell of it to either of them, or anybody
else, as long as you live. I guess poor father sha'n't know he's lost
any of his money he's worked so hard to get, if I can help it."

Chapter XXXV

A stranger passing Abel Edwards's house the day after his return
might have gotten the impression that one of the functions of village
life--a wedding or a funeral--was going on there. From morning until
late at night the people came down the road, wading through the snow,
the men with trousers tucked into boots, the women with
yarn-stockings over their shoes, their arms akimbo, pinning their
kilted petticoats to their hips. Many drove there in sleighs, tilting
to the drifts. The Edwards's door-yard was crowded with teams.

All the relatives who had come fourteen years before to Abel
Edwards's funeral came now to his resurrection. They had gotten the
news of it in such strange, untraceable ways, that it seemed almost
like mental telegraphy. The Greens of Westbrook were there--the three
little girls in blue, now women grown. One of them came with her
husband and baby; another with a blushing lout of a lad, to whom she
was betrothed; and the third, with a meek blue eye, on the watch for
a possible lover in the company. The Lawson sisters, from Granby,
arrived early in the day, being conveyed thither by an obliging
neighbor. Amelia Stokes rode to Upham on the butcher's wagon, in lieu
of another conveyance, and her journey was a long one, necessitating
hot ginger-tea and the toasting of her slim feet at the fire upon her
arrival. Amelia was clad in mourning for her old mother, who had died
the year before. At intervals she wept furtively, incited to grief by
recollections of