It
isn't only your strength, Ben, it is, I believe, still more your
self-forgetfulness. Then you forgot yourself because you thought of the
poor horse; and again, do you remember the day of Aunt Matoaca's death,
when you gave her your arm and took her little flag in your hand? You
would have marched all the way to the Capitol just like that, and I
don't believe you would ever have known that it looked ridiculous or
that people were laughing at you."

"To tell the truth, Sally, I should never have cared."

She clung closer, her perfumed hair on my breast.

"And yet they wondered why I loved you," she murmured; "they wondered
why!"

"Can you guess why I loved you?" I asked. "Was it for your red shoes? Or
for that tiny scar like a dimple I've always adored?"

"I never told you what made that," she said, after a moment. "I was a
very little baby when my father got angry with mamma one day--he had
been drinking--and he upset the cradle in which I was asleep."

She lifted her face, and I kissed the scar under the white shawl.

The next day when I came home to luncheon, she told me that she had been
to her old home to see Miss Mitty.

"I couldn't stand the thought of her loneliness, so I went into the
drawing-room at the hour I knew she would be tending her sweet alyssum
and Dicky, the canary. She was there, looking very thin and old, and,
Ben, she treated me like a stranger. She wouldn't kiss me, and she
didn't ask me a single question--only spoke of the weather and her
flower boxes, as if I had called for the first time."

"I know, I know," I said, taking her into my arms.

"And everybody else is so kind. People have been sending me flowers all
day. Did you ever see such a profusion? They are all calling, too,--the
Fitzhughs, the Harrisons, the Tuckers, the Mayos, Jennie Randolph came,
and old Mrs. Tucker, who never goes anywhere since her daughter died,
and Charlotte Peyton, and all the Corbins in a bunch." Then her tone
changed. "Ben," she said, "I want to see that little sister of yours.
Will you take me there this afternoon?"

Something in her request, or in the way she uttered it, touched me to
the heart.

"I'd like you to see Jessy--she's pretty enough to look at--but I didn't
mean you to marry my family, you know."

"I know you didn't, dear, but I've married everything of yours all the
same. If you can spare a few minutes after luncheon, we'll drive down
and speak to her."

I could spare the few minu