a' behaved
better'n she did, I'm bound to say. She got better lookin' all the
time, but she was as steady and sober as if she'd been sixty years
old. Parson Page said once that Milly Baker had more dignity than any
woman, young or old, that he'd ever seen. It seems right queer to talk
about dignity in a pore gyirl who'd made the misstep she'd made, but I
reckon it was jest that that made us all come to treat her as if she
was as good as anybody. People can set their own price on 'emselves,
I've noticed; and if they keep it set, folks'll come up to it. Milly
didn't seem to think that she had done anything wrong; and when she
brought little Richard up for baptism there wasn't a dry eye in the
church; and when she joined the church herself there wasn't anybody
mean enough to say a word against it, not even Silas Petty.

"Squire Elrod give her the cottage rent free after her mother died,
and betwixt nursin' and doin' fine needlework she made a good livin'
for herself and the boy.

"Little Richard was a child worth workin' for from the start. Tall and
straight as a saplin', and carried himself like he owned the earth,
even when he was a little feller. It looked like all the good blood on
both sides had come out in him, and there wasn't a smarter, handsomer
boy in the county. The old Squire thought a heap of him, and nothin'
but his pride kept him from ownin' the child outright and treatin' him
like he was his own flesh and blood. Richard had an old head on young
shoulders, though he was as full o' life as any boy; and by the time
he was grown the old Squire trusted him with everything on the place
and looked to him the same as if he'd been a settled man. After Old
Lady Elrod died, he broke terrible fast, and folks used to say it was
a pitiful sight to see him when he'd be watchin' Richard overseein'
the hands and tendin' to things about the place. He'd lean on the
fence, his hands tremblin' and his face workin', thinkin' about Dick
and grievin' over him and wishin', I reckon, that Dick had been such a
man as Milly's boy was.

"All these years nobody ever heard from Dick. Once in a while
somebody'd come from town and say they'd seen somebody that had seen
somebody else, and that somebody had seen Dick way out in California
or Lord knows where, and that was all the news that ever come back.
We'd all jest about made up our minds that he was dead, when one
mornin', along in corn-plantin' time, the news was brought and spread