“How do you explain it, Fan?” asked her brother.

“Explain it?  I can’t explain it.  Nobody seems to know anything about her, except that she’s from Boston and seems to have heaps of money.”

Jim was wiping his hands on the roller-towel behind the door.

“I had a chance to annex a little more of Miss Orr’s money today,” he observed grimly.  “But I haven’t made up my mind yet whether to do it, or not.”

Fanny laughed and shrugged her shoulders.

“If you don’t, somebody else will,” she replied.  “It was Deacon Whittle, wasn’t it?  He stopped at the house this afternoon and wanted to know where to find you.”

“They’re going right to work on the old place, and there’s plenty to do for everybody, including yours truly, at four dollars a day.”

“What sort of work?” inquired Fanny.

“All sorts:  pulling down and building up; clearing away and replanting.  The place is a jungle, you know.  But four dollars a day!  It’s like taking candy from a baby.”

“It sounds like a great deal,” said the girl.  “But why shouldn’t you do it?”

Jim laughed.

“Why, indeed?  I might earn enough to put a shingle or two on our own roof.  It looks like honest money; but—­”

Fanny was busy putting the finishing touches to the supper table.

“Mother’s going to stop for tea at Mrs. Daggett’s, and go to prayer meeting afterward,” she said.  “We may as well eat.”

The two sat down, facing each other.

“What did you mean, Jim?” asked Fanny, as she passed the bread plate to her brother.  “You said, ‘It looks like honest money; but—­’”

“I guess I’m a fool,” he grumbled; “but there’s something about the whole business I don’t like....  Have some of this apple sauce, Fan?”

The girl passed her plate for a spoonful of the thick compound, and in return shoved the home-dried beef toward her brother.

“I don’t see anything queer about it,” she replied dully.  “I suppose a person with money might come to Brookville and want to buy a house.  The old Bolton place used to be beautiful, mother says.  I suppose it can be again.  And if she chooses to spend her money that way—­”

“That’s just the point I can’t see:  why on earth should she want to saddle herself with a proposition like that?”

Fanny’s mute lips trembled.  She was thinking she knew very well why Lydia Orr had chosen to come to Brookville:  in some way unknown to Fanny, Miss Orr had chanced to meet the incomparable Wesley Elliot, and had straightway set her affections upon him.  Fanny had been thinking it over, ever since the night of the social at Mrs. Solomon Black’s.  Up to the moment when Wesley—­she couldn’t help calling him Wesley still—­had left her, on pretense of fetching a chair, she had instantly divined that it was a pretense, and of course he had not returned.  Her cheeks tingled hotly as she recalled the way in which Joyce Fulsom had remarked the plate of melting ice cream on the top shelf of Mrs. Black’s what-not: