sisted Virginia, a little angry with John Henry
because he had been the first to notice her blushes.

Rising hurriedly from the table, she went to the door and stood looking
out into the spangled dusk under the paulownias, while her mother
wrapped the bottle in a piece of white tissue paper and remarked with an
animation which served to hide her fatigue from the unobservant eyes of
her husband, that a walk would do her good on such a "perfectly lovely
night."

Gabriel, who loved her as much as a man can love a wife who has
sacrificed herself to him wisely and unwisely for nearly thirty years,
had grown so used to seeing her suffer with a smile that he had drifted
at last into the belief that it was the only form of activity she really
enjoyed. From the day of his marriage he had never been able to deny her
anything she had set her heart upon--not even the privilege of working
herself to death for his sake when the opportunity offered.

"Well, well, if you feel like it, of course you must go, my dear," he
replied. "I'll step over and sit a minute with Miss Priscilla while you
are away. Never could bear the house without you, Lucy."

While this protest was still on his lips, he followed her from the
house, and turned with Virginia and John Henry in the direction of the
Young Ladies' Academy. From the darkness beyond the iron gate there came
the soothing flow of Miss Priscilla's voice entertaining an evening
caller, and when the rector left them, as if irresistibly drawn toward
the honeyed sound of gossip, Virginia walked on in silence between John
Henry and her mother. At each corner a flickering street lamp burned
with a thin yellow flame, and in the midst of the narrow orbit of its
light several shining moths circled swiftly like white moons revolving
about a sun. In the centre of the blocks, where the darkness was broken
only by small flower-like flakes of light that fell in clusters through
boughs of mulberry or linden trees, there was the sound of whispering
voices and of rustling palm-leaf fans on the crowded porches behind
screens of roses or honeysuckle. Mrs. Pendleton, whose instinct prompted
her to efface herself whenever she made a third at the meeting of maid
and man (even though the man was only her nephew John Henry), began to
talk at last after waiting modestly for her daughter to begin the
conversation. The story of Aunt Ailsey, of her great age, and her
dictatorial temper, which made living with other