And when Ruth got out upon the street Mercy had her window open and cried through the opening, shaking her little fist the while: 

“Remember!  You tell Dusty Miller what I told you!  I’m coming out there.”

“What’s the matter with that young one?” growled Uncle Jabez, as Ruth climbed aboard and the mules started at a trot before she was really seated beside him.

Ruth told him, smiling, that Mercy had taken a fancy to his looks, and a fancy, too, to the Red Mill from her description of it.  “She wants very much to come out there this summer—­ if she can be moved that far.”

Then Ruth tried to thank the miller for the frock—­ which bundle she saw carefully placed among the other packages in the body of the wagon—­ but Uncle Jabez listened very grumpily to her broken words.

“I don’t know how to thank you, sir; for of all the things I wanted most, I believe this is the very first thing,” Ruth said, stumblingly.  “I really don’t know how to thank you.”

“Don’t try, then,” he growled, but without looking at her.  “I reckon you can thank Alviry Boggs as much as anybody.  She says I owed it to you.”

“Oh, Uncle—­”

“There, there!  I don’t wanter hear no more about it,” declared the miller.  But after they had rattled on for a while in silence, he said, pursuing the former topic:  “There ain’t no reason, I s’pose, why that gal can’t come out an’ see you bimeby, if you want her to.”

“Oh, thank you, Uncle Jabez!” cried Ruth, feeling as though something very strange indeed must have happened to the miller to make him so agreeable.  And she tried to be chatty and pleasant with him for the rest of the way home.  But Uncle Jabez was short on conversation—­ he seemed to have hoarded that up, too, and was unable to get at his stores of small-talk.  Most of his observations were mere grunts and nods, and that evening he was just as glum and silent as ever over his money and accounts.

Miss ’Cretia Lock arrived early on Monday morning and when Ruth came home from school in the afternoon the wonderful dress was cut out.  They made it in two days and Aunt Alvirah washed and starched and ironed it herself and it was ready for appearance on the last Friday afternoon of the term, when the district school held its graduating exercises.

CHAPTER XXII

 Mercy

Ruth felt that she was not very successful at Miss Cramp’s school.  Not that she had fallen behind in her studies, or failed to please her kind instructor; but among the pupils of the upper grade she was all but unconsidered.  Perhaps, had time been given her, Ruth might have won her way with some of the fairer-minded girls; but in the few short weeks she had been in the district she had only managed to make enemies among the members of her own class.

There was probably no girl in the graduating class, from Julia Semple and Rosa Ball, down the line, who was not glad that the girl from the Red Mill—­ a charity child!—­ was not numbered in the regular class and had no part in the graduating exercises.  Nevertheless, Ruth proposed, if it were possible, to enter the Cheslow High School in the fall, and to that end she was determined to work at her books—­ with Miss Cramp’s help—­ all summer.