tness for the trade. He understood colors, fabrics,
design; he had been sent abroad for ideas, and finally he was dispatched
to the Chicago house, to oversee the business there. Thus it was many
years before Dilly met him again; but they remained honestly faithful,
each from a lovely simplicity of nature, but a simplicity quite
different in kind. Jethro did not grow rich very fast (uncle Silas saw
to that), but he did prosper; and he was ready to marry his girl long
before she owned herself ready to marry him. She took care of a
succession of aged relatives, all afflicted by a strange and interesting
diversity of trying diseases; and then, after the last death, she
settled down, quite poor, in a little house on the Tiverton Road, and
"went out nussin'," the profession for which her previous life had
fitted her. With a careless generosity, she made over to her brother the
old farmhouse where they were born, because he had a family and needed
it. But he died, and was soon followed by his wife and child; and now
Dilly was quite alone with the house and the family debts. The time had
come, wrote Jethro, for them to marry. She was free, at last, and he had
enough. Would she take him, now? Dilly answered quite frankly and from a
serenity born of faith in the path before her and a certainty that no
feet need slip. She was ready, she wrote. She hoped he was willing she
should sell the old place, to pay Tom's debts. That would leave her
without a cent; but since he was coming for her, and she needn't go to
Chicago alone, she didn't know that there was anything to worry about.
He would buy her ticket. There was an ineffable simplicity about Dilly.
She had no respect whatever for money, save as a puzzling means to a few
necessary ends. And now the place had been sold, and Jethro was coming
in a month. Meanwhile Dilly was to pack up the few family effects she
could afford to keep, and the rest would go by auction.

Little as she was accustomed to dread experiences which came in the
inevitable order of nature, she did think of the last day and night in
the old house as something of an ordeal. People felt that the human
meant very little to Dilly; but that was not true. It was only true that
she held herself remote from personal intimacies; but all the fine,
invisible bonds of race and family took hold of her like irresistible
factors, and welded her to the universe anew.

As she started out from her little house, this summer morning