Mehetabel’s heart swelled within her, and tears of joy moistened her old eyes as she lay that night in her narrow, hard bed, too proud and excited to sleep.  The next day her sister-in-law amazed her by taking the huge pan of potatoes out of her lap and setting one of the younger children to peeling them.  “Don’t you want to go on with that quiltin’ pattern?” she said; “I’d kind o’ like to see how you’re goin’ to make the grape-vine design come out on the corner.”

By the end of the summer the family interest had risen so high that Mehetabel was given a little stand in the sitting-room where she could keep her pieces, and work in odd minutes.  She almost wept over such kindness, and resolved firmly not to take advantage of it by neglecting her work, which she performed with a fierce thoroughness.  But the whole atmosphere of her world was changed.  Things had a meaning now.  Through the longest task of washing milk-pans there rose the rainbow of promise of her variegated work.  She took her place by the little table and put the thimble on her knotted, hard finger with the solemnity of a priestess performing a sacred rite.

She was even able to bear with some degree of dignity the extreme honor of having the minister and the minister’s wife comment admiringly on her great project.  The family felt quite proud of Aunt Mehetabel as Minister Bowman had said it was work as fine as any he had ever seen, “and he didn’t know but finer!” The remark was repeated verbatim to the neighbors in the following weeks when they dropped in and examined in a perverse silence some astonishingly difficult tour de force which Mehetabel had just finished.

The family especially plumed themselves on the slow progress of the quilt.  “Mehetabel has been to work on that corner for six weeks, come Tuesday, and she ain’t half done yet,” they explained to visitors.  They fell out of the way of always expecting her to be the one to run on errands, even for the children.  “Don’t bother your Aunt Mehetabel,” Sophia would call.  “Can’t you see she’s got to a ticklish place on the quilt?”

The old woman sat up straighter and looked the world in the face.  She was a part of it at last.  She joined in the conversation and her remarks were listened to.  The children were even told to mind her when she asked them to do some service for her, although this she did but seldom, the habit of self-effacement being too strong.

One day some strangers from the next town drove up and asked if they could inspect the wonderful quilt which they had heard of, even down in their end of the valley.  After that such visitations were not uncommon, making the Elwells’ house a notable object.  Mehetabel’s quilt came to be one of the town sights, and no one was allowed to leave the town without having paid tribute to its worth.  The Elwells saw to it that their aunt was better dressed than she had ever been before, and one of the girls made her a pretty little cap to wear on her thin white hair.