ns, seeing that she was in no mood for
banter, asked sympathetically, "You're mighty tired, honey?"

Her voice with its southern drawl reminded Hertha poignantly of her
mammy. She longed childishly to put her head on the older woman's
shoulder as she would have put it on her colored mother's, and be
comforted. But she remained in her seat and answered with the single
word, "Discouraged."

"It's too hot to work," Mrs. Pickens said soothingly. "I've managed
myself to-day to spoil ten pounds of perfectly good fruit."

"What a shame!" Hertha was alert at the disaster. "Why wasn't I here to
help you! I know how to cook."

"You're a clever girl. You know the things you ought to know which is a
lot more than I do, having been spoilt in my youth. And the things you
don't know aren't worth worrying over."

"I don't seem to know how to earn my own living."

"Let some one, who wants to, earn it for you then."

In the silence that followed Mrs. Pickens devoutly hoped that her
bluntness had not hurt Dick's cause.

"Of course I can support myself," Hertha said at length in a low voice,
"I have already been a companion. I would rather do that again than just
to marry for a home. How do you know you are going to like the home you
get? If you're a companion you can leave it, but if you're married
you're expected to stay on no matter how much you may hate every step
you take and dread the thought of to-morrow!"

"Of course," Mrs. Pickens made haste to say, in some consternation, "you
mustn't marry if you feel like that!"

Hertha's voice was hardly audible. "I don't feel that way about Dick
to-day, but I don't know how I might feel to-morrow."

Her valley of indecision was black indeed; but Bob came to say
good-night and she forgot it for a time in her happiness with the child.

June flowered with tropical luxuriance in the city park. Wonderful blue
lilies, that Cleopatra might have inhaled for fragrance, floated on the
little pond by the side of their less foreign white and yellow
neighbors. Roses of all varieties and color grew in straight lines in
the Italian garden. Rhododendrons massed the hillside, gorgeous rose
color, and honeysuckle and sweet-smelling shrubs lined the paths or
clambered over the rustic arbors. There were times when Hertha, country
lover that she was, sighed at the studied prettiness of it all and waxed
weary at the constant stream of people who never gave Bob or herself a
chance to be alone, but it w