The daughter looked once more at her father. “You are going to carry _his_ things!” she said, with a stern, masterful inflection in her voice, and with flashing eyes. “Hope-to-die, Jess, I tried as hard as I could to get out of it--made all sorts of excuses,” Lawton pleaded, shrinking meantime from her gaze, and furtively but clumsily slipping the coin into his pocket. “But you know the kind of fellow Hod is--” he stammered here with confusion, and made haste to add--“what I mean is--he--well, he just wouldn’t take no for an answer.” She went, on coldly, as if she had not heard: “You have got _his_ money--I saw it--there in your hand.” “Well, I tell you what, Jess,” the father answered, with an accession of boldness, “half-dollars don’t grow on every bush up this way. I ain’t seen one afore in a fortnight. And to-morrow’s Thanksgiving, you know--and then you’ve come home--and what was a fellow to do?” The girl turned, as if it were fruitless to say more. Then the necessity for relief mastered her: she faced him again, and ground the words from between her set teeth with scornful sadness: “You take _his_ money--_and yet you knew!_” CHAPTER II.--CONFRONTING THE ORDEAL. JESSICA Lawton stood on the sidewalk outside the dépôt, and waited for the return of her father, who had gone in search of the expressman. The street up and down which she glanced was in a sense familiar to her, for she had been born and reared on a hillside road not far away, and until her eighteenth year had beheld no finer or more important place than this Thessaly--which once had seemed so big and grand, and now, despite the obvious march of “improvement,” looked so dwarfed and countrified in its overlarge, misfitting coat of snow. She found herself puzzled vaguely by the confusion of objects she remembered with things which appeared not at all to belong to the scene. There was the old Dearborn House, for example, on the same old corner, with its high piazza overhanging both streets, and its seedy brown clapboard sides that had needed a fresh painting as long as she could recollect--and had not got it yet. But beside it, where formerly had been a long, straggling line of decrepit sheds, was reared now a tall, narrow, flat-roofed brick building--the village fire-engine house; and through the half-open door, in which a man and a bull-dog stood surveying her, she could see the brassy brightness of a huge modern machine within. It seemed only yesterday that the manhood of Thessaly had rejoiced and perspired over the heavy, unwieldy wheeled pump which was dragged about with ropes and worked by means of long hand-brakes, with twelve men on a side, and a ducking from the hose for all shirkers. And here was a citified brick engine-house, and a “steamer” drawn by horses! Everywhere, as she looked, this incongruous jumbling of the familiar and the novel forced itself upon the girl’s attention. And neither the old nor the new bore on its face any welcome for her.