This settled, Aunt Betsy began to devise the best means of getting off with the least opposition. Both Morris and her brother would be absent from town during the next week, and she finally resolved to take that opportunity for starting on her visit to New York, wisely concluding to keep her own counsel until she was quite ready. Accordingly, on the very day Morris and the deacon left Silverton, she announced her intention so quietly and decidedly that further opposition was useless, and Mrs. Lennox did what she could to make her aunt presentable. And Aunt Betsy did look very respectable in her dark delaine, with her hat and shawl, both Morris' gift, and both in very good taste. As for the black silk and the new cap, they were carefully folded away, one in a box and the other in a satchel she carried on her arm, and in one compartment of which were sundry papers of fennel, caraway, and catnip, intended for Katy's baby, and which could be sent to it from New York. There was also a package of dried plums and peaches for Katy herself, and a few cakes of yeast of her own make, better than any they had in the city! Thus equipped she one morning took her seat in the Boston and New York train, which carried her swiftly on toward Springfield.
"If anybody can find their way in New York, it is Betsy," Aunt Hannah said to Mrs. Lennox, as the day wore on and their thoughts went after the lone woman, who with satchel, umbrella and capbox, was felicitating in the luxury of a whole seat, and the near neighborhood of a very nice young man, who listened with well-bred interest while she told of her troubles concerning the sheep pasture, and how she was going to New York to consult a first-rate lawyer.
Once she thought to tell who the lawyer was, and perhaps enhance her own merits in the eyes of her auditors by announcing herself as aunt to Mrs. Wilford Cameron, of whom she had no doubt he had heard--nay, more, whom he possibly knew, inasmuch as his home was in New York, though he spent much of his time at West Point, where he had been educated. But certain disagreeable remembrances of Aunt Hannah's parting injunction, "not to tell everybody in the cars that she was Katy's aunt," kept her silent on that point, and so Lieutenant Bob Reynolds failed to be enlightened with regard to the relationship existing between the fastidious Wilford Cameron of Madison Square, and the quaint old lady whose very first act on entering the car amused him vastly. At a glance he saw that she was unused to traveling, and as the car was crowded, he had kindly offered his seat near the door, taking the side one under the window, and so close to her that she gave him her capbox to hold while she adjusted her other bundles. This done and herself comfortably settled, she was just remarking that she liked being close to the door in case of a fire, when the conductor appeared, extending his hand officially toward her as the first one convenient. For an instant Aunt Betsy scanned him closely, thinking she surely had never seen him before, but as he seemed to claim acquaintance she could not find it in her kind heart to ignore him altogether, and so she grasped the offered hand, which she tried to shake, saying apologetically: "Pretty well, thank you, but you've got the better of me, as I don't justly recall your name."