sat there still; her heart beat heavily.

"Ann!" It was Mrs. John C.'s voice from the wagon. "Come git your jug."

Ann rose and went weakly out.

"There 'tis in the back o' the wagon," said Mrs. John C. "John'd git
out, but the colt's possessed to start, an' I don't like to be left with
the reins. Mercy, Ann! what's the matter o' you? You feel sick?"

Ann had dragged out the heavy jug, but there was no strength in her lean
arms, and she swayed almost to the ground.

"No," she said, in a dull quiet, "I ain't sick; my silver tea-set's
gone."

"Gone! gone where?"

"I don't know," said Ann, in the same despairing way, "unless somebody's
stole it."

"John, do you hear that?" cried Mrs. John C., in high excitement. "That
silver tea-set's gone. It's the one Ann sets her life by, an' it's wuth
I dunno what. Can't you do suthin'?"

John C. looked about him with a vague solemnity.

"Anybody could git into these woods," he said, "an' you'd have hard work
to find out where."

"Hard work!" repeated Mrs. John C., in extreme scorn. "I guess 't'll be
hard work, but so's a good many things. Don't set there talkin'. Don't
you worry, Ann! We'll stir up the neighbors, an' 'f your tea-set's
anywheres above ground, we'll have it back, or I'll miss my guess. Come,
John, come. Le' 's git along."

Power and vengeance breathed from all her portly frame, and so they
drove away, she even, as Ann saw, in her dull bewilderment, putting out
a hand to shake the whip in its socket, and John C. holding in the
plunging colt.

Ann wearily tugged in the molasses-jug and put it in its place. Then she
sat down by the window, trembling, not to think over what had happened,
but to bear her loss as she might. From the first moment of discovering
it, she had had no hope. Tragic things of this sort were strangers to
her simple life, and now that one had come, she knew no depth of
experience to draw from. Sickness she could bear, or death if it should
come, because they were factors of the common lot; but it had never
occurred to her that so resplendent a thing as a silver tea-set could
belong to any one and then be reft away.

The dusk gathered and thickened. The frogs were peeping down by the old
willows, and for the first time in her life the melancholy of early
spring lay cold upon her heart. It was perhaps eight o'clock when she
heard a hand at the door.

"Ann!" called Mrs. John C. "Ann, you there?"

Ann rose heavily.

"Come in," she