New England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories
Two years had gone when there came to her a little package, through the
Tiverton mail. It was tied with the greatest caution, and directed in a
straggling hand. Mary opened it just as she struck into the Gully Road,
on her way home. Inside was a little purse, and three gold pieces. She
paused there, under the branches, the purse in one hand, and the gold
lying within her other palm. For a long time she stood looking at them,
her face set in that patient sadness seen in those whose only holding
is the past. It was all over and done, and yet it had never been at
all. She thought a little about herself, and that was very rare, for
Mary. She was not the poorer for what her soul desired; she was
infinitely the richer, and she remembered the girl at Southport, not
with the pang that once afflicted her heart, but with a warm,
outrushing sense of womanly sympathy. If he had money, perhaps he could
marry. Perhaps he was married now. Coming out of the Gully Road, she
opened the purse again, and the sun struck richly upon the gold within.
Mary smiled a little, wanly, but still with a sense of the good, human
kinship in life.
"I won't ever spend 'em," she said to herself. "I'll keep 'em to bury
me."
A STOLEN FESTIVAL
David Macy's house stood on the spur of a breezy upland at the end of a
road. The faraway neighbors, who lived on the main highway and could
see the passin', often thanked their stars that they had been called to
no such isolation; you might, said they, as well be set down in the
middle of pastur'. They wondered how David's Letty could stand it. She
had been married 'most a year, and before that she was forever on the
go. But there! if David Macy had told her the sun rose in the west,
she'd ha' looked out for it there every identical mornin'.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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