y was talking about it."

"Has she changed much? I haven't seen her for years. She is hardly ever
in Dinwiddie."

"Well, she's fatter, but it's becoming to her. It makes her look softer.
She's a bit coarse, but she tells a capital story. I always liked Abby."

"Yes, I always liked Abby, too," answered Virginia, and it was on the
tip of her tongue to add that Abby had always liked Oliver. "If he
hadn't seen me, perhaps he might have married her," she thought, and the
remote possibility of such bliss for poor defrauded Abby filled her with
an incredible tenderness. She would never have believed that bouncing,
boisterous Abby Goode could have aroused in her so poignant a sympathy.

He appeared so much more cheerful than she had seen him since his
disastrous trip to New York, that, moved by an unselfish impulse of
gratitude towards the cause of it, she put out her hand to him, while he
raised his arm to extinguish the light.

"I am so glad about the horse, dear," she said. "It will be nice for you
to go sometimes with Abby."

"Why couldn't you come too, Jinny?"

"Oh, I shouldn't have time--and, besides, I gave it up long ago. I don't
think a mother has any business on horseback."

"All the same I wish you wouldn't let yourself go to pieces. What have
you done to your hands? They used to be so pretty."

She drew them hastily away, while the tears rose in a mist to her eyes.
It was like a man--it was especially like Oliver--to imagine that she
could clean up half a house and take charge of three children, yet keep
her hands as white and soft as they had been when she was a girl and did
nothing except wait for a lover. In a flash of memory, she saw the
reddened and knotted hands of her mother, and then a procession of hands
belonging to all the mothers of her race that had gone before her. Were
her own but a single pair in that chain of pathetic hands that had
worked in the exacting service of Love?

"It is so hard to keep them nice," she said; but her heart cried, "What
do my hands matter when it is for your sake that I have spoiled them?"
With her natural tendency to undervalue the physical pleasures of life,
she had looked upon her beauty as a passing bloom which would attract
her lover to the veiled wonders of her spirit. Fleshly beauty as an end
in itself would have appeared to her as immoral a cult as the wilful
pursuit of a wandering desire in the male.

"I never noticed until to-night what pretty hands Abby