wrists.

As she sat now, smiling and calm, at the head of her table, there was no
hint in her face of the gnawing anxiety behind the delicate blue-veined
hollows in her forehead. "I thought John Henry would come to supper,"
she observed, while her hands worked lovingly among the old white and
gold teacups which had belonged to her mother, "so I gathered a few
flowers."

In the centre of the table there was a handful of garden flowers
arranged, with a generous disregard of colour, in a cut-glass bowl, as
though all blossoms were intended by their Creator to go peaceably
together. Only on formal occasions was such a decoration used on the
table of the rectory, since the happiest adornment for a meal was
supposed to be a bountiful supply of visible viands; but the hopelessly
mended mats had pierced Mrs. Pendleton's heart, and the cut-glass bowl,
like her endless prattle, was but a pitiful subterfuge.

"Oh, I like them!" Virginia had started to answer, when a hearty voice
called, "May I come in?" from the darkness, and a large, carelessly
dressed young man, with an amiable and rather heavy countenance, entered
the hall and passed on into the dining-room. In reply to Mrs.
Pendleton's offer of tea, he answered that he had stopped at the
Treadwells' on his way up from work. "I could hardly break away from
Oliver," he added, "but I remembered that I'd promised Aunt Lucy to take
her down to Tin Pot Alley after supper, so I made a bolt while he was
convincing me that it's better to be poor with an idea, as he calls it,
than rich without one." Then turning to Virginia, he asked suddenly:
"What's the matter, little cousin? Been about too much in the sun?"

"Oh, it's only the rose in my hair," responded Virginia, and she felt
that there was a fierce joy in blushing like this even while she told
herself that she would give everything she possessed if she could only
stop it.

"If you aren't well, you'd better not go with us, Jinny," said Mrs.
Pendleton. "It was so sweet of John Henry to remember that I'd promised
to take Aunt Ailsey some of the bitters we used to make before the war."
Everything was "so sweet" to her, the weather, her husband's sermons,
the little trays that came continually from her neighbours, and she
lived in a perpetual state of thankfulness for favours so insignificant
that a less impressionable soul would have accepted them as undeserving
of more than the barest acknowledgment.

"I am perfectly well," in