nutive nose, "I
wonder now ef it would be _wrong_ to put some elder branches here
Christmas eve so thet--that--if they does bloom--I mean _do_
bloom--they'd be nigh him?"

"Howdy, Blossom," accosted a voice and the girl looked up startled.
Lone Stacy's wife stood at the thicketed edge of the burial-ground,
gazing at her, with eyes less friendly than their former wont.

The girl-widow came slowly forward, trying to smile, but under that
unblinking stare she felt unhappy, and the older woman went on with a
candid bluntness.

"La! Ye've done broke turrible, hain't ye? An' ye used ter be ther
purtiest gal hyarabouts, too."

"It's been--hard times fer me," Blossom answered faintly.

"Hit's done been right hard times fer all of us, I reckon," came the
uncompromising rejoinder, "but thet hain't no proper cause ter ketch
yore death of grave-yard damp," and with that admonition, Mrs. Stacy
went on her way.

Blossom stood silently looking after her, wondering vaguely why that
almost resentful note of hardness had rasped in her voice.

"I haven't done nothin'--anything, I mean," she murmured in distress.
"Why did she look at me that way, I wonder." Then suddenly she
understood. That was just it. She had not done anything. The old woman
was alone; her husband in prison and her son hunted from hiding place
to hiding place like some beast dogged to death, and she, the girl who
had always been like a daughter in that house, had been too stunned by
her own sorrow to take account of her neighbor's distress.

Mrs. Stacy had always expected that Blossom's children would be her
grandchildren. Turner had been wounded in defense of Jerry Henderson.
Into the girl's memory flashed a picture with a vivid completeness
which had failed to impress her in its just proportions at the time of
its reality. Then her eyes had been engrossed with one figure in the
group to the exclusion of all others. Now in retrospect she could
visualize the trio that had stumbled through the door of her house,
when they brought Jerry Henderson in. She could see again the way Bear
Cat had reeled and braced himself against the wall, and the stricken
wretchedness of his face.

Slowly the tremendous self-effacement of his generosity began to dawn
upon her, and to sting her with self-reproach.

So long as she lived she felt that her heart was dead to any love save
that for the man in the grave, but to the old comradeship--to the
gratitude for such a friendship