"Mr. Jerrold may think differently. I am dressed for him, and as I like it I mean to wear it," Bessie answered, curtly, but with a bright smile, as she looked into Neil's face.
"Oh, well; _chacun a son gout_," he said, consulting his watch, and adding: "It is time I was starting for the station; the train is due in fifteen minutes."
When he was gone Bessie began to feel a little nervous with regard to the stranger coming among them. Hitherto she had thought only of the extra expense and the trouble he would give old Dorothy, whose feet and ankles were badly swollen and paining her so much.
"I may have to cook and serve the Christmas dinner myself," she said, "and I don't mind the work; only I do not want this American from Boston, where the women are so full of brains, to think me a mere dishwasher and chimney-sweep. I wonder if he is half as nice as Neil says he is, and if I shall like him. Of course I sha'n't, but I shall treat him well for Neil's sake, and be so glad when he has gone."
Then she proceeded to lay the table for supper, as they usually dined in the middle of the day. Dorothy's feet were more active then, and Archie preferred an early dinner. Everything was in readiness at last; the bread and the butter and the jam, with cold chicken and ham, and the kettle singing on the hearth; the curtains drawn and the bright fire making shadows on the wall and falling upon the young girl, who, as her ear caught the sound of footsteps without, ran to the window, and parting the heavy curtains, looked out into the darkness so that the first glimpse Grey Jerrold had of her was of her fair, eager face framed in waves of golden brown hair, and pressed against the window pane in the vain effort to see the dreaded American.
Between the man of twenty-three and the boy of fourteen, who had knelt upon the snow in the leafless woods and asked God to forgive him for his grandfather's sin, and had pledged himself to undo as far as was possible the wrong to others that sin had caused, there was the difference of nine years of growth, and culture, and experience, and knowledge of the world; but otherwise the boy and the man were the same, for as the Grey of fourteen had been frank, and truthful, and generous, and wholly unselfish, with a gentleness in his nature like that of a tender, loving woman, so was the Grey of twenty-three whom we last saw upon the steamer which was taking him away from home and the lonely woman watching so tearfully upon the wharf, and feeling that with his going her joyless life was made more desolate.