on the street corner, two young
girls in white dresses and with fair hair passed her. She watched them
with darkening brow as they drew hastily together, and suddenly she
overheard the half-smothered exclamation which had a dozen times
to-day barely escaped her ears.

"What a pretty, pretty girl! Oh, my! how pretty, how pretty!"

Theodosia stood like one bewitched; a light like the illumination of
jewels was in her sapphire eyes; the color surged to her cheek; she
lifted up her head on its round, white throat; her lips curved. "Oh,
poor fool!" she thought in pity for herself, for this was what the
Colbury people had been saying all day in their swift, recurrent
glances, their half-masked asides, their furtive turning to look after
her. And she--to have given herself a day of such keen misery
unconscious of their covert encomiums!

"I live up thar in the wilderness till I jes' don't sense nothin',"
she said.

All the wilting prospects of life were refreshed as a flower in the
perfumed dew-fall. She felt competent, able to cope with them all; her
restored self-confidence pervaded her whole entity, spiritual and
material. She walked back with an elastic step, a breezy, debonair
manner, and she met Justus Hoxon at the gate of her cousin's yard with
a jaunty assurance, and with all the charm of her rich beauty in the
ascendant.

He would fain have detained her in the twilight. "What's that ye
promised to tell me 'lection day?"

"I 'lowed the day Wat war 'lected," she temporized, laying her hand on
the gate, which his stronger hand kept still closed.

"Waal, this is the day Wat is 'lected."

She drew back. Even in the dim light he could see her blue eyes
widening with inquiry as she looked at him.

"I 'lowed the returns warn't all in," she said doubtfully.

"They ain't, but enough hev kem in sence the polls closed ter gin him
a thumpin' majority. He's safe." The tense ring of triumph was in his
voice.

The scene was swimming before her; she was dazed by the sudden
alternations of hope and despair, of decision and counter-decision, by
the seeming instability of all this. Once more she thought, in a
tremble, and with a difference, of the mistake she might have made.
She held to the gate to keep her feet, no longer to open it.

"What did ye promise ter tell me 'lection day?" he demanded once
more, clasping her hand as it lay on the palings.

"'Lection day?" she said with a forced laugh--"'t ain't e-ended yit.