But he would not worry; it would all be right; and, in any event, Edna would be _his_, and could not “go back on him,” when she did find out; and he could easily persuade her it was all done from love and his fear of losing her. So he silenced his conscience, and let her go on blindly toward her fate, and surprised her one day with a proposition to elope. At first, Edna refused; but when the mail brought her a letter from Aunt Jerusha, she began to waver. She had asked her aunt for a dollar of pocket money, and her aunt had written a stinging reply, telling her she _had_ a dollar when she left home three weeks ago, and asking what had become of that. “I know,” she wrote, “that if you follow my instructions, you have put five cents every Sunday on the plate; that makes fifteen cents; then, you may have wanted some boot-lacings,—you always do,—and possibly some elastics, but that is _all_ you have any business to want; and you ought to have on hand _fifty cents_ at least, and still allow for some extravagance I can’t think of. No; I shan’t send you any dollar for three weeks to come; then, if the roads are not too muddy, I shall be in town with some butter, and eggs, and poultry, and, if I hear a good account of you, shall give you, maybe, seventy-five cents. “P.S. I’ve been half sorry that I let you go back to school this winter, for I ain’t feeling very well, and I shouldn’t wonder if I took you home with me for a spell. I’ve got stuff enough together to make a nice carpet, and you could cut and sew the rags.” Now Edna had not spent her dollar of pocket money in ways of which her aunt would at all approve. Fifteen cents had gone on the plate, and five cents more to Sunday-school. Fifteen more had gone for chocolates, and twenty-five more for the blue ribbon on her hair which Charlie liked so much; twenty-five more to a poor woman, carrying one child in her arms and leading another by the hand, while the remaining fifteen had been paid for a saucer of ice-cream which she shared with two of her companions; nothing for shoe-lacings, nothing for elastics, and only twenty cents for anything which would commend itself to her stern aunt, who would call the beggar woman an impostor, the blue ribbon trash and vanity, which Edna had promised to renounce, while the chocolates and cream would be classed under the head of _gormandizing_, if, indeed, the literal Miss Jerusha did not accuse her of “gluttony and stuffing.”