and Kate’s smart enough.  She’ll think twice before she’ll do that.  Elnora won’t wear a calico dress to high school again.  You watch and see if she does.  She may have the best clothes she’ll get for a time, for the least money, but she won’t know it until she tries to buy goods herself at the same rates.  Wesley, what about those prices?  Didn’t they shrink considerable?”

“You began it,” said Wesley.  “Those prices were all right.  We didn’t say what the goods cost us, we said what they would cost her.  Surely, she’s mistaken about being able to pay all that.  Can she pick up stuff of that value around the Limberlost?  Didn’t the Bird Woman see her trouble, and just give her the money?”

“I don’t think so,” said Margaret.  “Seems to me I’ve heard of her paying, or offering to pay those who would take the money, for bugs and butterflies, and I’ve known people who sold that banker Indian stuff.  Once I heard that his pipe collection beat that of the Government at the Philadelphia Centennial.  Those things have come to have a value.”

“Well, there’s about a bushel of that kind of valuables piled up in the woodshed, that belongs to Elnora.  At least, I picked them up because she said she wanted them.  Ain’t it queer that she’d take to stones, bugs, and butterflies, and save them.  Now they are going to bring her the very thing she wants the worst.  Lord, but this is a funny world when you get to studying!  Looks like things didn’t all come by accident.  Looks as if there was a plan back of it, and somebody driving that knows the road, and how to handle the lines.  Anyhow, Elnora’s in the wagon, and when I get out in the night and the dark closes around me, and I see the stars, I don’t feel so cheap.  Maggie, how the nation did Kate Comstock do that?”

“You will keep on harping, Wesley.  I told you she didn’t do it.  Elnora did it!  She walked in and took things right out of our hands.  All Kate had to do was to enjoy having it go her way, and she was cute enough to put in a few questions that sort of guided Elnora.  But I don’t know, Wesley.  This thing makes me think, too.  S’pose we’d taken Elnora when she was a baby, and we’d heaped on her all the love we can’t on our own, and we’d coddled, petted, and shielded her, would she have made the woman that living alone, learning to think for herself, and taking all the knocks Kate Comstock could give, have made of her?”

“You bet your life!” cried Wesley, warmly.  “Loving anybody don’t hurt them.  We wouldn’t have done anything but love her.  You can’t hurt a child loving it.  She’d have learned to work, to study, and grown into a woman with us, without suffering like a poor homeless dog.”