has your eyes, darling," adding: "_I've_ a new boy to show you, too,
you know."

The long, grave shadows of late afternoon, in which there was no
sadness, only the serene beauty of sleep, lay over the rolling fields
through which the sisters drove homeward, hand in hand. Each native tree
and wild-flower went to Sophy's heart. She so loved this friendly,
smiling country, that almost she believed it "loved her back again," as
children say. The silver-poplars along the road glittered whitely in a
soft breeze. The sky changed to sheeted gold above the bluish mountains.
As they turned in at the lawn of Sweet-Waters, the old box-shrubs
scraped against the carriage in a way that meant home, and only home.
Nowhere else in the world were box-trees set so close together on a
driveway, that carriages could not pass without being brushed by the
stiff leaves.

Sophy smiled, catching at a sprig as they passed, and Charlotte, also
smiling, said:

"Yes. Joe is still promising me to clip them properly."

The old red-brick of the house now glowed on them between the boughs of
tulip-trees and horse-chestnuts. They passed the clump of great acacia
trees, where stood the round, green tables, covered with pots of pink
and white geraniums. Sophy recalled that day when the London
window-boxes had brought this memory of home. Now she was here. Home was
reality--London the memory.

Judge Macon came down the front steps and took her in his arms as though
she had been in truth his sister. He was much moved. Somehow to see her
in the dull black of widow's weeds struck him as unnatural. Like most
men, he hated "mourning." It hurt him to see her brightness thus
quenched with crepe.

"Doggone it, Chartie," he said to his wife that night when they were
alone, "get that black off of our Sophy as soon as you can. For the
Lord's sake, get _some_ of it off right away. A human being can't go
through a Virginia summer draped like a hearse!"

Charlotte said:

"Oh, Joe, _don't_ talk so gruesomely. She'll wear white I'm sure--poor
darling."

Then she went to his shoulder and cried frankly.

"I hate it as much as you do," she said. "It almost makes me 'lose my
religion' to think of Sophy's being a widow. Don't you know how we--how
_every one_--always thought of Sophy as being brilliant and happy?"

"Yes, yes; so we did, so we did," he soothed her. Then he added soberly:

"But those are just the people who seem to attract misfortune ... like
light