"Oh, I thought o' that," he said. "But it's one thing to know how to work a thing an' it's a sight different to know how it's made an' all that. The future man tried to explain all the new scientific principles that was mixed into it--fer makin' power an' all--but I couldn't understand that part at all."
"An' besides," exclaimed Phoebe, "it's a heap more fun to be the only ones can use the thing, I think."
"Yes--seems like fun's all we're thinkin' of," said Rebecca, rising and moving toward the kitchen. "We're jest settin' round doin' nothin'. I'll finish with the breakfast things if you'll put to rights and dust, Phoebe. We can't make beds till night with the windows tight shut."
These suggestions were followed by the two women, while Droop, picking up the newspaper which Rebecca had brought, sat down to read.
After a long term of quiet reading, his attention was distracted by Rebecca's voice.
"I declare to goodness, Phoebe!" she was saying. "Seems's if every chance you get, you go to readin' those old letters."
"Well, the's one or two that's spelled so funny and written so badly that I haven't been able yet to read them," Phoebe replied.
Droop looked over his paper. Phoebe and her sister were seated near one of the windows on the opposite side.
"P'raps I could help ye, Cousin Phoebe," he said. "I've got mighty strong eyesight."
"Oh, 'tain't a question of eyesight," Phoebe replied, laughing.
"Oh, I see," said Droop, smiling slyly, "letters from some young feller, eh?"
He winked knowingly at Rebecca, who drew herself up indignantly and looked severely down at her knitting.
Phoebe blushed, but replied quite calmly:
"Yes--some of them from a young man, but they weren't any of them written to me."
"No?" said Droop. "Who was they to--'f I may ask?"
Phoebe held something out for Droop's inspection, and he walked over to take it.
He recognized at once the miniature on ivory which he had seen once before in Peltonville.
"Well," he said, taking the portrait from her and eying it with his head on one side, "if ye hadn't said 'twasn't you, I'd certainly a-thought 'twas. I'd mos' sworn 'twas your photygraph, Cousin Phoebe. Who is it, anyway?"
"It isn't anybody," she replied, "but it _was_ Mistress Mary Burton of Burton Hall. I'm one of her descendants, an' these are some letters she had with her in this funny old carved box when she disappeared with her lover. They fled to Holland and were married there, the story goes, an' one o' their children came over in the early days o' New England. He brought the letters an' the picture with him."