Mrs. Farnshaw, who had bought the groceries for her little family with the butter and eggs, and whose sugar had sometimes been short because there was a supply of Horse Shoe Plug to provide also, had no answer ready. CHAPTER XXVI "WAS--WAS MY PAPA HERE THEN?" Two years of favourable weather and good fortune with her livestock saw the money Elizabeth had invested in hogs doubled and trebled, and later, when the Johnson land was again offered for sale, she was able to buy it for cash and have the place well stocked after it was done. Silas Chamberlain, who watched Elizabeth with the same fatherly interest he had felt when her child was born, and who glowed with secret pride at the way in which she had won her way back into the country society about them, came in often and offered his measure of good-natured praise. He had prophesied the first time she had cooked for harvest hands that she would become a famous cook, but he had not expected to find her a famous farmer. What was still more astonishing to the old man was that she had become noted in quite other ways. The move she had made in going to meeting the first Sunday after John's departure, and Hepsie's explanation of it, had worked to her advantage in reestablishing her in the community as one of its factors, and opened to her the opportunity to wield the influence which Luther had pointed out to her the best educated woman in a community should wield. She took a class in the little Sunday school at the schoolhouse, not so much because she was an enthusiastic churchwoman as because it was the place where contact could be had. Elizabeth belonged to no church, but Elizabeth could turn the conversation of the church members, among whom she mingled, from gossip to better things, and there was not a quilting bee nor an aid society meeting in the country around to which she was not invited, and which she did not raise to a higher standard by her presence.