their wardrobes.
All that was left of Laura's money, and all that was given them by
Grant Ledwith's father, and Mr. Titus Oldways' astounding present of
three hundred dollars, without note or comment,--the first reminder
they had had of him since Edward Shiere's funeral, "and goodness
knew how he heard anything now," Aunt Oferr said,--had gone to this
outfit. But they were well set up and started in the world; so
everybody said, and so they, taking the world into their young,
confident hands for a plaything, not knowing it for the perilous
loaded shell it is, thought, merrily, themselves.

Up in Homesworth people did not have to wait for two thousand dollar
salaries. They would not get them if they did.

Oliver Ripwinkley, the minister's son, finished his medical studies
and city hospital practice that year, and came back, as he had
always said he should do, to settle down for a country doctor. Old
Doctor Parrish, the parson's friend of fifty years, with no child of
his own, kept the place for Oliver, and hung up his old-fashioned
saddle-bags in the garret the very day the young man came home. He
was there to be "called in," however, and with this backing, and the
perforce of there being nobody else, young Doctor Ripwinkley had ten
patients within the first week; thereby opportunity for shewing
himself in the eyes of ten families as a young man who "appeared to
know pretty well what he was about."

So that when he gave further proof of the same, by asking, within
the week that followed, the prettiest girl in Homesworth, Frances
Shiere, to come and begin the world with him at Mile Hill village,
nobody, not even Frank herself, was astonished.

She bought three new gowns, a shawl, a black silk mantle, and a
straw bonnet. She made six each of every pretty white garment that a
woman wears; and one bright mellow evening in September, they took
their first tea in the brown-carpeted, white-shaded little corner
room in the old "Rankin house;" a bigger place than they really
wanted yet, and not all to be used at first; but rented
"reasonable," central, sunshiny, and convenient; a place that they
hoped they should buy sometime; facing on the broad sidegreen of the
village street, and running back, with its field and meadow
belongings, away to the foot of great, gray, sheltering Mile Hill.

And the vast, solemn globe, heedless of what lit here or there upon
its breadth, or took up this or that life in its little freckling
c