ng in life to see him propped
up in bed with a striped skull-cap on, hooking his wife a shawl."

Lloyd laughed, but she followed the stooped figure with a glance of
sympathy. She knew from experience how hard it was to spend the time in
enforced idleness. Old Mr. Coburn had always been a familiar figure to
her. She recognized him on the road as she did the trees and the houses
which she passed daily, but he had never aroused her interest any more
than they. Now the knowledge that he was lonely like herself, so lonely
that, big, bearded man as he was, he had learned to knit in order to
occupy the dull days, seemed to put them on a common footing.

Lloyd took a long step forward out of her childhood that morning when
she wakened to the fact that some things are as hard to bear at fifty as
at fifteen. With a dawning interest she watched the people of the Valley
go by, one by one,--people whom she had passed heretofore as she had
passed the fence-posts on the road. It could never be so again, for
henceforth she would see them in a new light,--the light of
understanding and sympathy shed on them by Mrs. Bisbee's choice bits of
gossip or scraps of personal history.

She had watched the procession for nearly an hour, when Agnes Waring
suddenly turned the corner, and went into the store with a bundle in her
arms. Mrs. Bisbee, pausing in the act of threading a needle, looked out
again over her spectacles.

"There goes a girl I'm certainly sorry for. She is a born lady, and
comes of as good a family as anybody in the Valley, but she has to work
harder than any darkey in Lloydsboro. She's up at four o'clock these
winter mornings, milks the cow, chops wood, gets breakfast, and maybe
walks two or three miles with a big bundle like that, taking home
sewing, or going out to fit a dress for somebody."

Miss Allison had already awakened Lloyd's interest in Agnes, and she
leaned forward to watch her, while Mrs. Bisbee went on.

"She's never had any of the pleasures that most girls have. To my
certain knowledge she's never had a beau or been to a big party or
travelled farther than Louisville. I suppose you could count on the
fingers of one hand the times she has been on a train. She's wild about
music, but she's never had any advantages. By the way, she was in here
the day after the King's Daughters met at Allison MacIntyre's, to fit a
wrapper on me. Knowing how few outings she has, I encouraged her to talk
it all over, as I knew s