d with sudden energy,
"I've brought you a partridge. Mr. Dewlap had such nice ones. You must
try to eat it for supper."

"How like you that was, Jinny. You are your mother all over again. I
declare I am reminded of her more and more every time that I see you."

Tears sprang to Virginia's eyes, while her thin blue-veined hands gently
caressed Miss Priscilla's swollen and knotted fingers.

"You couldn't tell me anything that would please me more," she answered.

"I used to think that Lucy would take after her, but she grew up
differently."

"Yes, neither of the girls is like her. They are dear, good children,
but they are very modern."

"Have you heard from them recently?"

"A few days ago, and they are both as well as can be."

"And what about Harry? I've always believed that Harry was your
favourite, Jinny."

For an instant Virginia hesitated, with her eyes on the pot of red
geraniums blooming between the white muslin curtains at the window. In
his little cage in the sunlight, Miss Priscilla's canary, the last of
many generations of Dickys, burst suddenly into song.

"I believe that Harry loves me more than anybody else in the world
does," she answered at last. "He'd come to me to-morrow if he thought I
needed him."

Lying there in her great white bed, with her enormous body, which she
could no longer turn, rising in a mountain of flesh under the linen
sheet, the old teacher closed her eyes lest Virginia should see her soul
yearning over her as it had yearned over Lucy Pendleton after the
rector's death. She thought of the girl, with the flower-like eyes and
the braided wreath of hair, flitting in white organdie and blue ribbons,
under the dappled sunlight in High Street, and she said to herself, as
she had said twenty-five years ago, "If there was ever a girl who looked
as if she were cut out for happiness, it was Jinny Pendleton."

"They say that Abby Goode is going to be married at last," remarked
Virginia abruptly, for she knew that such bits of gossip supplied the
only pleasant excitement in Miss Priscilla's life.

"Well, it's time. She waited long enough," returned the teacher, and she
added, "I always knew that she was crazy about Oliver by the way she
flung herself at his head." She had never liked Abby, and her
prejudices, which had survived the shocks of life, were not weakened by
the approaching presence of Death. It was characteristic of her that she
should pass into eternity with both her lo