ve,--the Edgewood shoemaker, who lay
next,--even his resting-place was marked and, with a touch of some one's
imagination marked by the old man's own lapstone twenty-five pounds in
weight, a monument of his work-a-day life.

Waitstill rose from her feet, brushing the earth from her hands, and
Patty did the same. The churchyard was quiet, and they were alone with
the dead, mourned and unmourned, loved and unloved.

"I planted one or two pansies on the first one's grave," said Waitstill
soberly. "I don't know why we've never done it before. There are no
children to take notice of and remember her; it's the least we can do,
and, after all, she belongs to the family."

"There is no family, and there never was!" suddenly cried Patty. "Oh!
Waity, Waity, we are so alone, you and I! We've only each other in all
the world, and I'm not the least bit of help to you, as you are to me!
I'm a silly, vain, conceited, ill-behaved thing, but I will be better,
I will! You won't ever give me up, will you, Waity, even if I'm not like
you? I haven't been good lately!"

"Hush, Patty, hush!" And Waitstill came nearer to her sister with a
motherly touch of her hand. "I'll not have you say such things; you
that are the helpfullest and the lovingest girl that ever was, and the
cleverest, too, and the liveliest, and the best company-keeper!"

"No one thinks so but you!" Patty responded dolefully, although she
wiped her eyes as if a bit consoled.

It is safe to say that Patty would never have given Mark Wilson a second
thought had he not taken her to drive on that afternoon in early May.
The drive, too, would have quickly fled from her somewhat fickle memory
had it not been for the kiss. The kiss was, indeed, a decisive factor
in the situation, and had shed a rosy, if somewhat fictitious light of
romance over the past three weeks. Perhaps even the kiss, had it never
been repeated, might have lapsed into its true perspective, in due
course of time, had it not been for the sudden appearance of the
stranger in the Wilson pew. The moment that Patty's gaze fell upon that
fashionably dressed, instantaneously disliked girl, Marquis Wilson's
stock rose twenty points in the market. She ceased, in a jiffy, to weigh
and consider and criticize the young man, but regarded him with wholly
new eyes. His figure was better than she had realized, his smile more
interesting, his manners more attractive, his eyelashes longer; in
a word, he had suddenly grown de