dly at the minister.

Alexina reached out and, with a passionate sort of protectingness,
took hold of the beringed hand wielding a fan with vivacity and
sprightliness.

"I wish we could have given him more advantages," Mrs. Leroy was
continuing; "but he's had to plan for us somehow instead. I remember
he wasn't eleven years old, though it seemed natural enough he should
be doing it at the time, when we came over from St. Louis to
Louisville without his father, and Willy had to buy the tickets and
check the trunks. I suppose I ought to have realized it, but I never
had done such things in my life, and I lost my purse in the depot, I
remember, and a gentleman found it, and so Willy took hold.

"We sent him into town here, after we came to Aden, to the
Presbyterian minister, who taught him. He wanted to go to college, not
that he'd admit it now. Then as soon as he was any size he began at
his father about reclaiming the grove. That is, Willy planned and
Georges listened. Willy'd got an idea from Mr. Jonas that the railroad
was coming through some day, just as it has, but it's been a long pull
and a wait, for this is the first full yield for his trees. He's been
offered seven thousand for the crop as it hangs, but the mortgage is
eight thousand on the place, which went for fertilizing and ditching
and sheds, and living, you know, so Willy is holding for eight
thousand and Mr. Jonas is urging for nine."

Charlotte's pride in these statements was beaming.

"As soon as the grove proves itself, the place will sell for several
times its old value, and we're going back to Kentucky, to Woodford.
Willy wants to buy back my father's farm, not that he'll let me say
that he does, he's so afraid of admitting anything, but when he was
nineteen, three years ago, he had the measles--wasn't it dear and
comical, like he was a child again--and he let me hold his hand, in
the dark room, you know, and we talked about it, when we would go
back."

The girl was patting Charlotte's hand softly and winking back tears
while she laughed. Why tears? She herself had no idea.

Mrs. Leroy had a thousand questions to ask, she said, but somehow she
never got to them.

"Dear me," she said presently, "we have to go and I've talked of
nothing but my own affairs. In my solitude down here I've grown a
shameless egotist."

As if she had been ever anything else, the unconscious soul!

"But to be with one of my own sex--some one linked with the past,