tatus,
would have been hard put to it either to comprehend the true inwardness
of the relationship that existed between these girls of one race and
this old woman of another or to figure how there could be but one
outcome. The average Southerner would have been able at once to sense
the sentiments and the prejudices underlying the dilemma that now
confronted the orphaned pair, and to sympathise with them, and with the
old negress too.

To begin with, there were the fine things to be said for Aunt Charlotte;
the arguments in her behalf--a splendid long golden list of them
stretching back to their babyhood and beyond, binding them with ties
stronger almost than blood ties to this faithful, loving, cantankerous,
crotchety old soul. Aunt Charlotte had been born in servitude, the
possession of their mother's mother. She had been their mother's
handmaiden before their mother's marriage. Afterward she had been their
own nurse, cradling them in babyhood on her black breast, spoiling
them, training them, ruling them, overruling them, too, coddling them
when they were good, nursing them when they were ailing, scolding them
and punishing them when they misbehaved.

After their father's death their mother, then an invalid, had advised as
frequently with Aunt Sharley regarding the rearing of the two daughters
as with the guardians who had been named in her husband's will--and with
as satisfactory results. Before his death their father had urged his
wife to counsel with Aunt Sharley in all domestic emergencies. Dying, he
had signified his affectionate regard for the black woman by leaving her
a little cottage with its two acres of domain near the railroad tracks.
Regardless though of the fact that she was now a landed proprietor and
thereby exalted before the eyes of her own race, Aunt Sharley had
elected to go right on living beneath the Dabney roof. In the latter
years of Mrs. Dabney's life she had been to all intents a copartner in
the running of the house, and after that sweet lady's death she had been
its manager in all regards. In the simple economies of the house she had
indeed been all things for these past few years--housekeeper, cook,
housemaid, even seamstress, for in addition to being a poetess with a
cook-stove she was a wizard with a needle.

As they looked back now, casting up the tally of the remembered years,
neither Emmy Lou nor Mildred could recall an event in all their lives
in which the half-savage, half-child