During her school days, Jethro used frequently to find himself in front of the schoolhouse when the children came trooping out—­quite by accident, of course.  Winter or summer, when he went away on his periodical trips, he never came back without a little remembrance in his carpet bag, usually a book, on the subject of which he had spent hours in conference with the librarian at the state library at the capital.  But in June of the year when Cynthia was fifteen, Jethro yielded to that passion which was one of the man’s strangest characteristics, and appeared one evening in the garden behind the store with a bundle which certainly did not contain a book.  With all the gravity of a ceremony he took off the paper, and held up in relief against the astonished Cynthia a length of cardinal cloth.  William Wetherell, who was looking out of the window, drew his breath, and even Jethro drew back with an exclamation at the change wrought in her.  But Cynthia snatched the roll from his hand and wound it up with a feminine deftness.

“Wh-what’s the matter, Cynthy?”

“Oh, I can’t wear that, Uncle Jethro,” she said.

“C-can’t wear it!  Why not?”

Cynthia sat down on the grassy mound under the apple tree and clasped her hands across her knees.  She looked up at him and shook her head.

“Don’t you see that I couldn’t wear it, Uncle Jethro?”

“Why not?” he demanded.  “Ch-change it if you’ve a mind to hev green.”

She shook her head, and smiled at him a little sadly.

“T-took me a full hour to choose that, Cynthy,” said he.  “H-had to go to Boston so I got it there.”

He was, indeed, grievously disappointed at this reception of his gift, and he stood eying the cardinal cloth very mournfully as it lay on the paper.  Cynthia, remorseful, reached up and seized his hand.

“Sit down here, Uncle Jethro.”  He sat down on the mound beside her, very much perplexed.  She still held his hand in hers.  “Uncle Jethro,” she said slowly, “you mustn’t think I’m not grateful.”

“N-no,” he answered; “I don’t think that, Cynthy.  I know you be.”

“I am grateful—­I’m very grateful for everything you give me, although I should love you just as much if you didn’t give me anything.”

She was striving very hard not to offend him, for in some ways he was as sensitive as Wetherell himself.  Even Coniston folk had laughed at the idiosyncrasy which Jethro had of dressing his wife in brilliant colors, and the girl knew this.

“G-got it for you to wear to Brampton on the Fourth of July, Cynthy,” he said.

“Uncle Jethro, I couldn’t wear that to Brampton!”

“You’d look like a queen,” said he.

“But I’m not a queen,” objected Cynthia.

“Rather hev somethin’ else?”

“Yes,” she said, looking at him suddenly with the gleam of laughter in her eyes, although she was on the verge of tears.