ing warm
enough to sit on the porch playing his guitar. The sound of the twanging
strings, and the appealing vibration of his young voice in a plaintive
minor air, came over to her. She gathered the sheets together and
pressed them to her face as though they were flowers, or the hands of
little children.

"I've got to tell him--to-night," she whispered to herself, in the
dusky, small, dismantled room. "I've got to get him to see it as I do. I
must make myself worthy of him before I let him take me for his own."

She thrust the letters into the breast-pocket of her coat and ran
downstairs. Mavity Bence stood in the hall, plainly awaiting her.

"Honey," she began fondly, "I've been putting away Pap's things
to-day--jest like you oncet found me putting away Lou's. I came on this
here." And then Johnnie noticed a folded bandanna in her hands.

"You-all asked me to let ye go through and find that nickel ore, and ye
brung it out in a pasteboard box; but this here is what it was in on the
day your Uncle Pros fetched hit here, and I thought maybe you'd take a
interest in having the handkercher that your fortune come down the
mountains in."

"Yes, indeed, Aunt Mavity," said Johnnie, taking the bandanna into her
own hands.

"Pap, he's gone," the poor woman went on tremulously, "an' the evil what
he done--or wanted to do--is a thing that I reckon you can afford to
forget. You're a mighty happy woman, Johnnie Consadine; the Lord knows
you deserve to be."

She stood looking after the girl as she went out into the twilit street.
Johnnie was dressed as she chose now, not as she must, and her clothing
showed itself to be of the best. Anything that might be had in Wautaga
was within her means; and the tall, graceful figure passing so quietly
down the street would never have been taken for other than a member of
what we are learning to call the "leisure class." When the shadows at
the end of the block swallowed her up, Mavity turned, wiping her eyes,
and addressed herself to her tasks.

"I reckon Lou would 'a' been just like that if she'd 'a' lived," she
said to Mandy Meacham, with the tender fatuity of mothers. "Johnnie
seems like a daughter to me--an' I know in my soul no daughter could be
kinder. Look at her makin' me keep every cent Pap had in the bank, when
Laurelly could have claimed it all and kep' it."

"Yes, an' addin' somethin' to it," put in Mandy. "I do love 'em
both--Johnnie an' Deanie. Ef I ever was so fortunate