ll neatly packed. She would need to unpack it again
that night, but it was a comfort to her. She had scarcely spoken all
day; her thin mouth had a set look.

"Mandy's gettin' so homesick she can't speak," said Mrs. Babcock.
"She can't hardly wait till to-morrow to start, can you, Mandy?"

"No, I can't," replied Amanda.

Mrs. Field was in her bedroom changing her dress when Lois put on her
hat and went down the street with some finished work for the
dressmaker for whom she sewed.

"Where you goin', Lois?" asked Mrs. Babcock, when she came through
the room with her hat on.

"I'm going out a little ways," answered Lois evasively. She had tried
to keep the fact of her sewing for a living from the Green River
women. She knew how people in Elliot talked about it, and estranged
as she was from her mother, she wanted no more reflections cast upon
her.

But Mrs. Babcock peeped out of a window as Lois went down the path.
"She's got a bundle," she whispered. "I tell you what 'tis, I suspect
that girl is sewin' for somebody to earn money. I should think her
mother would be ashamed of herself."

Lois had a half mile to walk, and she stayed awhile at the
dressmaker's to sew. When she started homeward it was nearly three
o'clock.

It was a beautiful afternoon, the house yards were full of the late
summer flowers, the fields were white and gold with arnica and
wild-carrot instead of buttercups and daisies, the blackberries were
ripe along the road-side, and there were sturdy thickets of weeds
picked out with golden buttons of tansy over the stone walls. Lois
stepped along lightly. She did not look like the same girl of three
months ago. It was strange that in spite of all her terrible distress
of mind and hard struggles since she came to Elliot it should have
been so, but it was. Every life has its own conditions, although some
are poisons. Whether it had been as Mrs. Babcock thought, that the
girl had been afflicted with no real malady, only the languor of the
spring, intensified and fostered in some subtle fashion by her
mother's anxiety, or whether it had been the purer air of Elliot that
had brought about the change, to whatever it might have been due, she
was certainly better.

Lois had on an old pink muslin dress that she had worn many a summer,
indeed the tucks had been let down to accord with her growth, and
showed in bars of brighter pink around the skirt. But the color of
the dress became her well, her young shou