I'm to blame for it all; but I--I meant as well as
anybody could!"
"'Sh, Jane! Rosy hasn't gone to England to live, and your father isn't
dying. How can you talk that way?"
"And my old room!" Jane went on with a stringent cry, as her eyes roamed
despairingly over its dismantled walls. "I never lived anywhere else, and
I don't want to, and I can't! I don't want to live at all! And this old
house isn't ours any longer, and those carriage people will begin to tear
it down to-morrow. They'll take away the barn and chop down the trees,
and there won't be a single thing left to remember it all by." She bent
her head on the window-sill again, and sobbed more vehemently still.
"Oh, Jane, Jane!" cried her mother, protestingly, "how can you act that
way when there is so much to be done, and when your father is feeling so
much worse than usual? Where were those pillows left, anyway? Come,
come!"
Jane rose to her knees and tried to wipe her face with the piece of
wall-paper. Then her mother lifted her up and led her out through the
hall.
It was a chilly day in early November--a high wind lashing the gray and
foaming lake--when David Marshall, wrapped in shawls and bolstered up
with pillows, was driven carefully over the three miles of flinty macadam
which led from his old house to his new one, and was put to bed again in
a large, half-warmed apartment, fitted up scantily and provisionally with
an old chamber-set that had escaped the auctioneer.
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