was all
too good a worker, and tried anxiously to make up for his brother's
shortcomings.

"Pony, he's a little feller," Milo would say pitifully. "He ain't nigh
as old as I am. It comes easier to me than what it does to him to stay
in the house and tend my frames, and do like I'm told. If the bosses
would call me when he don't do to suit 'em, I could always get him
to mind."

Lissy had something of her mother's shining vitality, but it dimmed
woefully in the rough-and-ready clatter and slam of the big
Victory mill.

The children had come from the sunlit heights and free air of the
Unakas. Their play had been always out of doors, on the mosses under
tall trees, where fragrant balsams dropped cushions of springy needles
for the feet; their labour, the gathering of brush and chips for the
fire in winter, the dropping corn, and, with the older boys, the hoeing
of it in spring and summer--all under God's open sky. They had been
forced into the factory when nothing but places on the night shift could
be got for them. Day work was promised later, but the bitter winter wore
away, and still the little captives crept over the bridge in the
twilight and slunk shivering home at dawn. Johnnie made an arrangement
to get off from her work a little earlier, and used to take the two
girls over herself; but she could not go for them in the morning. One
evening about the holidays, miserably wet, and offering its squalid
contrast to the season, Johnnie, plodding along between the two little
girls, with Pony and Milo following, met Gray Stoddard face to face. He
halted uncertainly. There was a world of reproach in his face, and
Johnnie answered it with eyes of such shame and contrition as convinced
him that she knew well the degradation of what she was doing.

"You need another umbrella," he said abruptly, putting down his own as
he paused under the store porch where a boy stood at the curb with his
car, hood on, prepared for a trip in to Watauga.

"I lost our'n," ventured Pony. "It don't seem fair that Milo has to get
wet because I'm so bad about losing things, does it?" And he smiled
engagingly up into the tall man's face--Johnnie's own eyes,
large-pupilled, black-lashed, full of laughter in their clear depths.
Gray Stoddard stared down at them silently for a moment. Then he pushed
the handle of his umbrella into the boy's grimy little hand.

"See how long you can keep that one," he said kindly. "It's marked on
the handle with my