and Mrs. Arthur Scodd-Paston, of Boxton Park, Witham, Essex, England
(as one of the newspapers took the trouble to put it) passed out through
the rusty old front gate into married life.
A few days later David Marshall, to the surprise and dismay of the
remaining members of the family, took to his bed.
XXI
"Where are you, Jane?"
Eliza Marshall's voice sounded impatiently in the hallway, and presently
her nervous hand was placed on the knob of her daughter's door.
"Well, here you are, finally. And what is the matter, for the land's
sake? And where is the pillow you went to get for your father?--we can't
keep him waiting out in the carriage on such a day as this. Come, get up;
you'll catch your death of cold yourself."
Jane was lying on the bare floor of her stripped and emptied room, with
her head pillowed upon the window-sill. She wore her sack, but her hat
had fallen off and lay at her side. In her hand she held a stiff and
curling width of paper just torn from the wall, and her body shook with
sobs as she lifted her wide and welling eyes to her mother's face.
"I am to blame," she cried, wildly; "I am to blame for it all! If it
hadn't been for me we should never have left our old home and given up
our old life, and Rosy wouldn't have cut all our friends and gone to
England to live; and Truesdale wouldn't be talking about starting off
across the Pacific for somewhere or other, and we should never have made
enemies of those Beldens, and poor pa wouldn't have lost his business,
and wouldn't be going off to die inch by inch in that big cold place out
on the prairie.
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