For a long time there was just a lot of talk about the dairy business and Jersey cows, importation records, and the Herd Improvement Registry. Then the talk turned specifically to Miss Hamilton’s little dairy herd. Testing procedures for measuring and recording butterfat production had been pioneered there, and it had been discovered that cows in Miss Wigglesworth’s bull’s breeding line were amazingly productive—so productive in fact that for breeding purposes Miss Wigglesworth’s bull was, well, in short, they were interested, very interested, if the father would consider—and since he was not a dairyman himself—

“But you see—,” said the father.

“We are very interested in acquiring this animal, sir,” said Mr. Sharples from Philadelphia.

“Maybe you don’t realize the importance of…,” said the representative of the American Jersey Cattle Club, and there was a lengthy explanation of the Babcock Butterfat Test.

“But—,” the father said.

“Sir,” said the manager of Miss Hamilton’s dairy, “Miss Hamilton is prepared to pay a considerable sum.”

“But you must not know what has happened here,” said the father. “That bull—”

“A small fortune in fact, sir,” said Mr. Sharples from Philadelphia.

“Damn Yankees,” said the mother at the supper table that night, gripping her knife and fork in tight fists, “coming into our house with their talk of small fortunes.” She beamed across the table at her son, seated like a little prince on a chair with a tasseled cushion, who still managed a limp when he remembered.

“But,” Miss Wigglesworth started up in a quavering voice, “the bull…the small fortune…”

“Miss Wigglesworth!” the mother said in a withering tone. “This has nothing to do with you!” And she swept down on her son with kisses, saying, “No Yankee’s small fortune can pay for my child’s life!”

It was much later that someone, maybe a maid or a gardener, missed Miss Wigglesworth.

“She’s moping over that…animal,” snapped the mother, and someone was sent to the woods pasture to find her. They looked in the garden, they looked in the barn.

Finally someone thought to check Miss Wigglesworth’s room. Her clothes, her Bible and Book of Inspirational Verses, her plaster statue of the Three Graces, her filigree-glass basket, and her trunk, all were gone. There was not even a sliver of soap on the wash-hand stand.

“Without so much as a by-your-leave!” snapped the mother, remembering the other melodramatic scenes of departure: the buttoned-up cloak, the strapped-up trunk, and then the sniveling and the tears. “You watch—she’ll be back.”

But Miss Wigglesworth did not come back. In fact, Miss Wigglesworth was never seen or heard from again.