tor, kissing her; and a minute later
they entered the dining-room, which was on the right of the staircase.
The old mahogany table, scarred by a century of service, was laid with
a simple supper of bread, tea, and sliced ham on a willow dish. At one
end there was a bowl of freshly gathered strawberries, with the dew
still on them, and Mrs. Pendleton hastened to explain that they were a
present from Tom Peachey, who had driven out into the country in order
to get them. "Well, I hope his wife has some, also," commented the
rector. "Tom's a good fellow, but he could never keep a closed fist,
there's no use denying it."

Mrs. Pendleton, who had never denied anything in her life, except the
biblical sanction for the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution,
shook her head gently and began to talk in the inattentive and anxious
manner she had acquired at scantily furnished tables. Ever since the
war, with the exception of the Reconstruction period, when she had lived
practically on charity, she had managed to exist with serenity, and
numerous negro dependents, on the rector's salary of a thousand dollars
a year. Simple and wholesome food she had supplied to her family and her
followers, and for their desserts, as she called the sweet things of
life, she had relied with touching confidence upon her neighbours. What
they would be for the day, she did not know, but since poverty, not
prosperity, breeds the generous heart, she was perfectly assured that
when Miss Priscilla was putting up raspberries, or Mrs. Goode was making
lemon pie, she should not be forgotten. During the terrible war years,
it had become the custom of Dinwiddie housekeepers to remember the wife
of the rector who had plucked off his surplice for the Confederacy, and
among the older generation the habit still persisted, like all other
links that bound them to a past which they cherished the more
passionately because it guarded a defeated cause. Like the soft
apologetic murmur of Mrs. Pendleton's voice, which was meant to distract
attention rather than to impart information, this impassioned memory of
the thing that was dead sweetened the less romantic fact of the things
that were living. The young were ignorant of it, but the old _knew_.
Mrs. Pendleton, who was born a great lady, remained one when the props
and the background of a great lady had crumbled around her; and though
the part she filled was a narrow part--a mere niche in the world's
history--she fille