de up her mind.

It was almost impossible for Ivory to hold his peace then, so full of
gratitude was his soul and so great his longing to pour out the feeling
that flooded it. He pulled himself together and led the way out of the
churchyard. To look at Waitstill again would be to lose his head, but to
his troubled heart there came a flood of light, a glory from that lamp
that a woman may hold up for a man; a glory that none can take from him,
and none can darken; a light by which he may walk and live and die.

XI. A JUNE SUNDAY

IT was a Sunday in June, and almost the whole population of
Riverboro and Edgewood was walking or driving in the direction of the
meeting-house on Tory Hill.

Church toilettes, you may well believe, were difficult of attainment by
Deacon Baxter's daughters, as they had been by his respective helpmates
in years gone by. When Waitstill's mother first asked her husband to buy
her a new dress, and that was two years after marriage, he simply said:
"You look well enough; what do you want to waste money on finery for,
these hard times? If other folks are extravagant, that ain't any
reason you should be. You ain't obliged to take your neighbors for an
example:--take 'em for a warnin'!"

"But, Foxwell, my Sunday dress is worn completely to threads," urged the
second Mrs. Baxter.

"That's what women always say; they're all alike; no more idea o' savin'
anything than a skunk-blackbird! I can't spare any money for gew-gaws,
and you might as well understand it first as last. Go up attic and open
the hair trunk by the winder; you'll find plenty there to last you for
years to come."

The second Mrs. Baxter visited the attic as commanded, and in turning
over the clothes in the old trunk, knew by instinct that they had
belonged to her predecessor in office. Some of the dresses were neat,
though terribly worn and faded, but all were fortunately far too short
and small for a person of her fine proportions. Besides, her very soul
shrank from wearing them, and her spirit revolted both from the insult
to herself and to the poor dead woman she had succeeded, so she came
downstairs to darn and mend and patch again her shabby wardrobe.
Waitstill had gone through the same as her mother before her, but in
despair, when she was seventeen, she began to cut over the old garments
for herself and Patty. Mercifully there were very few of them, and they
had long since been discarded. At eighteen she had learned to