But Trina suffered a reaction after the quarrel.  She began to be sorry she had refused to help her husband, sorry she had brought matters to such an issue.  One afternoon as she was at work on the Noah’s ark animals, she surprised herself crying over the affair.  She loved her “old bear” too much to do him an injustice, and perhaps, after all, she had been in the wrong.  Then it occurred to her how pretty it would be to come up behind him unexpectedly, and slip the money, thirty-five dollars, into his hand, and pull his huge head down to her and kiss his bald spot as she used to do in the days before they were married.

Then she hesitated, pausing in her work, her knife dropping into her lap, a half-whittled figure between her fingers.  If not thirty-five dollars, then at least fifteen or sixteen, her share of it.  But a feeling of reluctance, a sudden revolt against this intended generosity, arose in her.

“No, no,” she said to herself.  “I’ll give him ten dollars.  I’ll tell him it’s all I can afford.  It is all I can afford.”

She hastened to finish the figure of the animal she was then at work upon, putting in the ears and tail with a drop of glue, and tossing it into the basket at her side.  Then she rose and went into the bedroom and opened her trunk, taking the key from under a corner of the carpet where she kept it hid.

At the very bottom of her trunk, under her bridal dress, she kept her savings.  It was all in change—­half dollars and dollars for the most part, with here and there a gold piece.  Long since the little brass match-box had overflowed.  Trina kept the surplus in a chamois-skin sack she had made from an old chest protector.  Just now, yielding to an impulse which often seized her, she drew out the match-box and the chamois sack, and emptying the contents on the bed, counted them carefully.  It came to one hundred and sixty-five dollars, all told.  She counted it and recounted it and made little piles of it, and rubbed the gold pieces between the folds of her apron until they shone.

“Ah, yes, ten dollars is all I can afford to give Mac,” said Trina, “and even then, think of it, ten dollars—­it will be four or five months before I can save that again.  But, dear old Mac, I know it would make him feel glad, and perhaps,” she added, suddenly taken with an idea, “perhaps Mac will refuse to take it.”

She took a ten-dollar piece from the heap and put the rest away.  Then she paused: 

“No, not the gold piece,” she said to herself.  “It’s too pretty.  He can have the silver.”  She made the change and counted out ten silver dollars into her palm.  But what a difference it made in the appearance and weight of the little chamois bag!  The bag was shrunken and withered, long wrinkles appeared running downward from the draw-string.  It was a lamentable sight.  Trina looked longingly at the ten broad pieces in her hand.  Then suddenly all her intuitive desire of saving, her instinct of hoarding, her love of money for the money’s sake, rose strong within her.