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The desire that she might suddenly be transferred to Plainton or to heaven was gradually fading out of her mind, and the blue sky, the distant waves, and the thought of the approaching meal were exercising a somewhat pleasurable influence upon her dreamy feeling, when Captain Burke, who stood near with a telescope, announced that the steamer over there on the horizon line was heading south and that he had a notion she was the Antonina, the vessel on which Shirley had sailed.
Cliff's dining-room, but this idea soon faded out of the Plainton mind, which was not adapted to grasp and hold it. Consequently, as Mr. Burke had a great deal to do with the building, and as Mrs. Cliff did not appear to be concerned in it at all, it was generally believed that the gentleman at the hotel was putting up a house for himself on the corner lot.
Cliff to herself, as she turned from the window and selected a fresh easy chair, and sank down into its luxurious depths, "there is nothing in this world so delightful as to go back rich to Plainton. To be rich in Paris or New York is nothing to me; it would simply mean that I should be a common person there as I used to be at home, and, for the matter of that, a little more common."
Cliff, now a widow with money enough to live well upon and keep a carriage, was making out her will, and was thinking of her friends in Plainton, it would be impossible for her to forget one who was the oldest friend of all. So it is easy to see why she did not want to go to Mrs.
She thought of the mental chains and fetters she had worn when she went to Plainton with plenty of money in her purse and a beautiful pair of California blankets in her handsome trunk; when she had been afraid to speak of the one or to show the other; when she had sat quietly and received charity from people whose houses and land, furniture, horses, and cows, she could have bought and given away without feeling their loss; when she had been publicly berated by Nancy Shott for spending money on luxuries which should have been used to pay her debts; when she had been afraid to put her money in the bank for fear it would act as a dynamite bomb and blow up the fortunes of her friends, and when she could find no refuge from the miseries brought upon her by the necessity of concealing her wealth except to go to bed and cover up her head so that she should not hear the knock of some inquiring neighbor upon her front door.
People there want so much time to get ready to do anything!" "But there is nobody in the town that I would care to take on a first voyage," said Mrs. Cliff. "You know, something might go wrong and we would have to come back, and if it is found necessary to do that, I don't want any Plainton people on board!"
But when they had been left the sole representatives of their family, and when misfortune after misfortune had come down upon them and swept away their estates and nearly all of their income, they had retired to the little town of Plainton where they happened to own a house.
Edna wished very much to see Mrs. Cliff before she left the country, and wrote that if it would be convenient for that lady, she would run up to Plainton and stay a day or two with her. There would be time enough for this before the steamer sailed. When she read this brief note, Mrs. Cliff sprang out of bed. "Edna come here!" she exclaimed. "That would be simply ruin! But I must see her.
With only a small leather bag in her hand, and nearly all her ready money and her peace-destroying draft sewed up inside the body of her dress, she left Plainton, and when her friends and neighbors heard that she had gone, they could only ascribe such a sudden departure to the strange notions she had imbibed in foreign parts.
She could not repress a feeling of pride, for she would be looked upon as one of the principal persons if not the principal person in Plainton; but she could not believe that any real friend could possibly object to that.
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