sceerce, folks would go to huntin' 'em and
makin' a big fuss over 'em. Annie made herself hard to git, and that's
why Dick wanted her instead o' Harriet Amos, that was jest as good
lookin' and better in every other way than Annie was. Everybody was
sayin' what a blessed thing it was, and now Dick would give up his
wild ways and settle down and be a comfort to the Squire in his old
age.

"Well, along in the spring, a year after Annie got through with
school, Sally Ann come to me, and says she, 'Jane, I saw somethin'
last night and it's been botherin' me ever since;' and she went on to
say how she was goin' home about dusk, and how she'd seen Dick Elrod
and little Milly Baker at the turn o' the lane that used to lead up to
Milly's house. 'They was standin' under the wild cherry tree in the
fence corner,' says she, 'and the elderberry bushes was so thick that
I could jest see Dick's head and shoulders and the top of Milly's
head, but they looked to be mighty close together, and Dick was
stoopin' over and whisperin' somethin' to her.'

"Well, that set me to thinkin', and I ricollected seein' Dick comin'
down the lane one evenin' about sunset and at the same time I'd caught
sight o' Milly walkin' away in the opposite direction. Our Mite
Society met that day, and Sally Ann and me had it up, and we all
talked it over. It come out that every woman there had seen the same
things we'd been seein', but nobody said anything about it as long as
they wasn't certain. 'Somethin' ought to be done,' says Sally Ann;
'it'd be a shame to let that pore child go to destruction right before
our eyes when a word might save her. She's fatherless, and pretty
near motherless, too,' says she.

"You see, the Bakers was tenants of old Squire Elrod's, and after
Milly's father died o' consumption the old Squire jest let 'em live on
the same as before. Mis' Elrod give 'em quiltin' and sewin' to do, and
they had their little gyarden, and managed to git along well enough.
Some folks called 'em pore white trash. They was pore enough, goodness
knows, but they was clean and hard-workin', and that's two things that
'trash' never is. I used to hear that Milly's mother come of a good
family, but she'd married beneath herself and got down in the world
like folks always do when they're cast off by their own people. Milly
had come up like a wild rose in a fence corner, and she was jest the
kind of a girl to be fooled by a man like Dick, handsome and smooth
ta