She made no difficulty, but after all was adjusted she looked at the lawyer with a shrewd, sharp gleam in her eyes.
"Doctor Prescott can't get his claws on it now, anyhow," she said; "and he always wanted it, 'cause it joined his." The Squire and the lawyer looked at each other.

The Squire with humorous amazement, the lawyer with a wink and glance of wise reminder, as much as to say: "You know what I have always said about women.

Here is a woman." Jerome was digging out in his garden-patch, and Elmira, in her blue sunbonnet, was standing, full of scared questioning, before him, when the Squire came lounging up the slope and reported as before said, to the convincing of the boy in innocent credulity.
When he had finished, he laid hold on Elmira's little cotton sleeve and pulled her up to her brother, and stood before them with a kindly hand on a shoulder of each, smiling down at them with infinite good-humor and protection.
"Don't you worry now, children," he said.

"Be good and mind your mother, and you'll get along all right.

We'll manage about the interest money, and there'll be meal in the barrel and a roof over your heads as long as you want it, according to the Scriptures, I'll guarantee." With that Squire Eben gave each a shake, to conceal, maybe, the tenderness of pity in him, which he might, in his hearty and merry manhood, have accounted somewhat of a shame to reveal, as well as tears in his blue eyes, and was gone down the hill with a great laugh.
Elmira looked after him.