the class," she exclaimed. "I must go and attend
to them."

They walked along the corridor and entered the hall. Dr. Winthrop was
seated at the piano, drumming idly on the keys.

"I did not know where you had gone," he said. "I knew you would be
around, of course, since the lights were not out, and so I came in here
to wait for you."

"Listen, John, I have a wonderful story to tell you."

Then she told him Mrs. Harper's story. He listened attentively and
sympathetically, at certain points taking his eyes from Clara's face and
glancing keenly at Mrs. Harper, who was listening intently. As he looked
from one to the other he noticed the resemblance between them, and
something in his expression caused Mrs. Harper's eyes to fall, and then
glance up appealingly.

"And now," said Clara, "I am happy. I know my name. I am a Virginia
Stafford. I belong to one, yes, to two of what were the first families
of Virginia. John, my family is as good as yours. If I remember my
history correctly, the Cavaliers looked down upon the Roundheads."

"I admit my inferiority," he replied. "If you are happy I am glad."

"Clara Stafford," mused the girl. "It is a pretty name."

"You will never have to use it," her lover declared, "for now you will
take mine."

"Then I shall have nothing left of all that I have found"----

"Except your husband," asserted Dr. Winthrop, putting his arm around
her, with an air of assured possession.

Mrs. Harper was looking at them with moistened eyes in which joy and
sorrow, love and gratitude, were strangely blended. Clara put out her
hand to her impulsively.

"And my mammy," she cried, "my dear Virginia mammy."

The Sheriffs Children

Branson County, North Carolina, is in a sequestered district of one of
the staidest and most conservative States of the Union. Society in
Branson County is almost primitive in its simplicity. Most of the white
people own the farms they till, and even before the war there were no
very wealthy families to force their neighbors, by comparison, into the
category of "poor whites."

To Branson County, as to most rural communities in the South, the war is
the one historical event that overshadows all others. It is the era from
which all local chronicles are dated,--births, deaths, marriages,
storms, freshets. No description of the life of any Southern community
would be perfect that failed to emphasize the all pervading influence of
the great conflict.

Yet the