guilty fear.
Yes! Mr. Hunt was a wise man, who knew the world, and trebly sage in her generation was his spouse. If their daughter had never acknowledged this before, she did now, in her disgust and dismay at this utter overthrow of her dreams of the virtuous simplicity to be found in lowly homes, where riches and fashions were things unknown.
CHAPTER III.
Summer had come to the country with its bloom and its beauty, its harvests and its holidays. In town, its fever heat drew noisome smells from overcharged sewers, and the black, oily paste to which the shower that should have been refreshing had changed the dust of crowded thoroughfares. Cleaner pavements, in the higher portions of the city, burned through shoe-soles; glass radiated heat to polished stone, and stone radiated, in its turn, to brick, that waited until the evening to throw off its surplus caloric in hot, suffocating waves that made yet more oppressive the close nights. The gay procession of fashionable humming birds had commenced their migrations, steamboats and excursion craft multiplied at the wharves, and the iron steed put forth all his tremendous might to bear onward the long train of self-exiled travelers.
The Hunts, too, must leave town; Lucy must, at all events, have a full season, and a brilliant one, if possible, for it was her second summer, and much might depend upon it. Her mother would accompany her, of course; and equally of course her father could not; that is, he must return after escorting them to Saratoga, and spend the remainder of the warm months at home. His business would not allow him to take an extended vacation. The boys were easily disposed of, being boarded every summer at the farmhouse of an early friend of Mr. Hunt, where they were acceptable inmates, their clothes as well cared for as they were at home, and their morals more diligently cultivated. The younger girls caused that excellent manager, their mother, more perplexity. This was not the first time she had repented her indiscretion in allowing Sarah to "come out" before her elder sister had "gone off." But "Sarah was so tall and so womanly in her appearance that it looked queer, and would set people to talking if I kept her back," she was accustomed to excuse her impolitic move to her friends. This summer she realized, as she had not done before, the inconvenience of having two full-fledged young ladies upon the carpet at once. Lucy's elegant and varied wardrobe, and the certain expenses in prospect for her and her chaperon at Spa, seaside, and en route, left a balance in hand of the sum allotted for the season's expenditure that was startling in its meagerness. Mrs. Hunt was a capital financier, a peerless economist, but the exigency taxed her resources to the utmost.
One morning she arose with a lightened heart and a smoother brow. "I've settled it!" she exclaimed to her husband, shaking him from his matutinal doze.
The "Eureka!" of the Syracusan mathematician was not more lofty in its exultation. Forthwith she unfolded to him her scheme. She was a native of New Jersey, "the Jarseys" she had heard it called in her father's house—had probably thus denominated the gallant little state herself in her girlhood. In and around the pretty, quiet village of Shrewsbury there were still resident scores of her relatives whose very names she had sedulously forgotten. One alone she could not, in conscience or in nature, dismiss to such oblivion. This was her elder and only sister, long married to a respectable and worthy farmer, and living within a mile of "the old place," where both sisters had drawn the first breath of life. Twice since Mrs. Hunt had lived in the city had this kind friend been summoned on account of the dangerous illness of the former, and her presence and nursing had restored peace, order, and health to the household. The earlier of these occasions was that of the second child's birth, and in the softened mood of her convalescence Mrs. Hunt had bestowed upon the babe her sister's name—Sarah Benson—a homely appellative she had ofttimes regretted since. At distant and irregular intervals, one, two, three years, Mr. or Mrs. Benson visited their connections in "York;" but the intercourse grew more difficult and broken as time rolled on and the distance widened between the plain country folk and their rising relations. Then, again, death had been busy in the farmhouse; coffin after coffin, of varying lengths, but all short, was lifted over the threshold and laid away in the village graveyard, until but one was left to the parents of the seven little ones that had been given to them, and to that one nature had denied the gifts of speech and hearing. Grief and the infirmities of approaching old age disinclined the worthy pair to stir from home, and their ambitious sister was too busy in building up a "set" of her own, and paving the way for her daughters' distinction, to hide her light for ever so short a period in so obscure a corner as her former home.
Aunt Sarah, however, could not forget her nurseling. Every few months there arrived some simple token of affectionate remembrance to "the child" she had not seen since she wore short frocks and pinafores. The reception of a basket of fruit, thus despatched, was the suggestive power to Mrs. Hunt's present plan. She had made up her mind, so she informed her husband straightway, to write that very day—yes! that very forenoon, to "Sister Benson," and inquire whether she would board Sarah and Jeannie for a couple of months.
"I don't s'pose she will let me pay board for them, but she will be pleased to have 'em as long as they like to stay. It's never been exactly convenient for me to let any of the children go there for so many years, and it's so fur off. But dear me! sometimes I feel real bad about seeing so little of my only sister!"—a heavy sigh. "And there'll be the expenses of two saved, out and out, for they won't need a great variety of clothes in that out-of-the-way place."
"But how will the girls, Sarah and Jeannie, fancy being sent off so?" inquired Mr. Hunt.
"Oh, as to that, it is late in the day for my children to dispute what I say shall be done; and Sarah's jest that odd that she'll like this notion twenty times better than going to Newport or Saratoga. I know her! As to Jeannie, she is satisfied to be with her sister anywhere. She is getting thin, too; she looks real peaked, and there's nothing in creation so good for ailing children as the salt-water bath. They have first-rate still-water bathing not a quarter of a mile from sister's. It's jest the thing, I tell you! The wonder is it never came into my head before."
Mr. Hunt had his sigh now. "Somehow or other he was always down in the mouth when the family broke up for the summer," his wife frequently complained, and his lack of sympathy now excited her just ire.
"Upon my word, Mr. H.! anybody would think that I was the poorest wife in the world to you to see and hear you whenever I talk to you of my plans and household affairs. You look as if you was about to be hanged, instead of feeling obliged to me for turning, and twisting, and contriving, and studying, day and night, how to save your money, and spend what we must lay out to the best advantage. I can tell you what—there's few women would make your income go as far as I do."
"I know that, my dear. The question is"—Mr. Hunt paused, cleared his throat and strained his nerves for a mighty effort, an unprecedented exercise of moral courage—"the question is, Betsy, whether our income is stretched in the right direction!" Mistaking the stare of petrified incredulity he received for fixed attention, the infatuated man went on: "This doubt is always forced upon me when we separate in July, some to go to one place, some to another, a broken, wandering family for months together. I am growing old, and I love to have my children about me; I begin to feel the want of a home. There is Johnson, in the—— Bank, gets five hundred less per annum than I do; yet, after living quietly here a few years, he bought himself a snug cottage up the river, and has his family there in their own house, everything handsome and comfortable about them. I have been in the harness for a long while; I expect to die in it. I don't mind work—hard work! but it seems to me sometimes that we would all be better satisfied if we had more to show, or to hold, for our money; if there were less of this straining after appearances, this constant study to make both ends meet."
"And it has come to this!" Mrs. Hunt sank into a chair and began to cry. "This is my thanks for slaving and toiling for better than twenty years to get you and your children a stand in the world! It isn't for myself that I care. I can work my fingers to the bone, and live upon a crust! I can scrape and save five dollars or so a month! I can bury myself in the country! But your children! those dear, sweet girls, that have had the best education money can buy, and that to-day visit such people as the Murrays, and