The next day in the mill, the noise was just as jarring and her feet in Triphena’s old boots swelled just as large, but now and again she caught herself humming. Why am I suddenly happy? What wonderful thing is about to happen to me? And then she remembered. Tonight after supper, Betsy would read to her again. She was, of course, afraid for Oliver, who was all mixed up in her mind with Charlie. But there was a delicious anticipation, like molded sugar on her tongue. She had to know what would happen to him, how his story would unfold.

Diana noticed the change. “You’re settling in faster than I thought,” she said. But Lyddie didn’t tell her. She didn’t quite know how to explain to anyone, that it wasn’t so much that she had gotten used to the mill, but she had found a way to escape its grasp. The pasted sheets of poetry or Scripture in the window frames, the geraniums on the sill, those must be some other girl’s way, she decided. But hers was a story.

As the days melted into weeks, she tried not to think how very kind it was of Betsy to keep reading to her. There were nights, of course, when she could not, when there was shopping or washing that had to be done. On Saturday evenings they were let out two hours early and Amelia corralled Lyddie and Prudence for long walks along the river before it grew too dark. Betsy, of course, did whatever she liked regardless of Amelia. Sundays Amelia dragged the reluctant Lyddie to church. At first Lyddie had been afraid Betsy would go on reading without her, but Betsy waited until Sunday afternoon, when Amelia and Prudence were down in the dining room writing their weekly letters home, and she picked up the story just where she had stopped on the previous Friday evening.

It was several weeks before Lyddie caught on that the novel was from the lending library and thus cost Betsy five cents a week to borrow. On her own, Betsy could have read it much faster, Lyddie was sure of that. As much as she hated to spend the money, on her first payday, Lyddie insisted on giving Betsy a full ten cents to help with Oliver’s rent. Betsy laughed, but she took it. She, too, was saving her money, she confessed quietly to Lyddie and asked her not to tell, to go for an education. There was a college out West in Ohio that took female students—a real college, not a young ladies’ seminary. “But don’t tell Amelia,” she said, her voice returning to its usual ironic tone, “she’d think it unladylike to want to go to Oberlin.”