"Some time Grey will know, for I must tell him, and he will help me."

This fancy that Grey was to lift the cloud which overshadowed her, was a
consolation to Hannah, and helped to make life endurable, when at last
his parents returned from Europe, and he went to his home in Boston.
After that Grey spent some portion of every summer at the farm-house
growing more and more fond of his Aunt Hannah, notwithstanding her quiet
manner and the severe plainness of her personal appearance so different
from his mother and his Aunt Lucy Grey. His Aunt Hannah always wore a
calico dress, or something equally as plain and inexpensive, and her
hands were rough and hard with toil, for she never had any one to help
her. She could not afford it, she said, and that was always her excuse
for the self-denials she practiced. And still Grey knew that she
sometimes had money, for he had seen his father give her gold in
exchange for bills, and he once asked her why she did not use it for her
comfort. There was a look of deep pain in her eyes, and her voice was
sadder than its wont, as she replied:

"I cannot touch that money. It is not mine; it would be stealing, to
take a penny of it."

Grey saw the question troubled his Aunt Hannah, and so he said no more
on the subject, but thought that when he was a man, and had means of his
own, he would improve and beautify the old farm-house, which, though
scrupulously neat and clean, was in its furnishing plain in the extreme.
Not a superfluous article, except what had been sent from Boston, had
been bought since he could remember, and the carpet, and chairs, and
curtains in the best room had been there ever since his father was a
boy. And still Grey loved the place better than Grey's Park, where he