ead. In the girl's face, where at
first there had been only admiration, a change came gradually. A quiver,
so faint that it was hardly more than a shadow, passed over her drawn
features, and her gaze left the trailing yards of silk and wandered to
the blue October sky over the swinging leaves of the paulownia. But
instead of the radiant autumn weather at which she was looking, she
still saw that black silk polonaise which she wanted as she wanted youth
and pleasure, and which she knew that she should never have.

"Everything is finished but this, isn't it, Miss Willy?" asked Virginia,
and at the sound of her happy voice, that strange quiver passed again
through the other girl's face.

"Everything except that organdie and a couple of nightgowns." There was
no quiver in Miss Willy's face, for from constant consideration of the
poorhouse and the cemetery, she had come to regard the other problems of
life, if not with indifference, at least with something approaching a
mild contempt. Even love, when measured by poverty or by death, seemed
to lose the impressiveness of its proportions.

"And I'll have enough clothes to last me for years, shan't I, mother?"

"I hope so, darling. Your father and I have done the best that we could
for you."

"You've been angels. Oh, how I shall hate to leave you!"

"If only you weren't going away, Jinny!" Then she broke down, and
dropping the tomato-shaped pin-cushion she had been holding, she slipped
from the room, while Virginia thrust the polonaise into Miss Willy's
hands and fled breathlessly after her.

In the girl's room, with her head bowed on the top of the little
bookcase, above those thin rows of fiction, Mrs. Pendleton was weeping
almost wildly over the coming separation. She, who had not thought of
herself for thirty years, had suddenly broken the constraint of the long
habit. Yet it was characteristic of her, that even now her first
feeling, when Virginia found her, should be one of shame that she had
clouded for an instant the girl's happiness.

"It is nothing, darling. I have a little headache, and--oh, Jinny!
Jinny!----"

"Mother, it won't be long. We are coming back to live just as soon as
Oliver can get work. It isn't as if I were going for good, is it? And
I'll write you every day--every single day. Mother, dearest, darling
mother, I can't stay away from you----"

Then Virginia wept, too, and Mrs. Pendleton, forgetting her own sorrow
at sight of the girl's tears,