“Perhaps that lady that come one day give her some,” the keeper’s wife suggested mildly.

“Then Betsey would have told me,” said Mrs. Dow, with injured dignity.

VI.

On the morning of her disappearance, Betsey rose even before the pewee and the English sparrow, and dressed herself quietly, though with trembling hands, and stole out of the kitchen door like a plunderless thief.  The old dog licked her hand and looked at her anxiously; the tortoise-shell cat rubbed against her best gown, and trotted away up the yard, then she turned anxiously and came after the old woman, following faithfully until she had to be driven back.  Betsey was used to long country excursions afoot.  She dearly loved the early morning; and finding that there was no dew to trouble her, she began to follow pasture paths and short cuts across the fields, surprising here and there a flock of sleepy sheep, or a startled calf that rustled out from the bushes.  The birds were pecking their breakfast from bush and turf; and hardly any of the wild inhabitants of that rural world were enough alarmed by her presence to do more than flutter away if they chanced to be in her path.  She stepped along, light-footed and eager as a girl, dressed in her neat old straw bonnet and black gown, and carrying a few belongings in her best bundle-handkerchief, one that her only brother had brought home from the East Indies fifty years before.  There was an old crow perched as sentinel on a small, dead pine-tree, where he could warn friends who were pulling up the sprouted corn in a field close by; but he only gave a contemptuous caw as the adventurer appeared, and she shook her bundle at him in revenge, and laughed to see him so clumsy as he tried to keep his footing on the twigs.

“Yes, I be,” she assured him.  “I’m a-goin’ to Pheladelphy, to the Centennial, same’s other folks.  I’d jest as soon tell ye’s not, old crow;” and Betsey laughed aloud in pleased content with herself and her daring, as she walked along.  She had only two miles to go to the station at South Byfleet, and she felt for the money now and then, and found it safe enough.  She took great pride in the success of her escape, and especially in the long concealment of her wealth.  Not a night had passed since Mrs. Strafford’s visit that she had not slept with the roll of money under her pillow by night, and buttoned safe inside her dress by day.  She knew that everybody would offer advice and even commands about the spending or saving of it; and she brooked no interference.

The last mile of the foot-path to South Byfleet was along the railway track; and Betsey began to feel in haste, though it was still nearly two hours to train time.  She looked anxiously forward and back along the rails every few minutes, for fear of being run over; and at last she caught sight of an engine that was apparently coming toward her, and took flight into the woods before she could gather courage to follow the path again.  The freight train proved to be at a standstill, waiting at a turnout; and some of the men were straying about, eating their early breakfast comfortably in this time of leisure.  As the old woman came up to them, she stopped too, for a moment of rest and conversation.