iggle. Maybe it's a copy of Eugenia's gate of roses. It
looks like the frame of a doahway. Just the casing, you know. Maybe it's
a doah of mawning-glories they're going to pass through. I recognize
those flowahs twined all around it. We made them a long time ago for the
lamp-shades when the King's Daughtahs had an oystah suppah at the manse.
I made all those purple mawning-glories and Betty made the yellow ones."

Glancing over his shoulder, he happened to spy a familiar face behind
him, the kindly old black face of his uncle's cook.

"Howdy, Aunt Jane!" he exclaimed, with a friendly smile. Then, in a
stage whisper, he asked, "Aunt Jane, can you tell me? Are those
morning-glories artificial?"

The old woman wrinkled her face into a knot as she peered in the
direction of the pulpit, toward which he nodded. One of the words in his
question puzzled her. It was a stranger to her. But, after an instant,
the wrinkles cleared and her face broadened into a smile.

"No'm, Mistah Alex. Them ain't artificial flowahs, honey. They's made of
papah."

Again an amused smile stole out of the corner of Lloyd's eye to answer
the gleam of mischief in Alex's. Not for anything would she have Aunt
Jane think that she was laughing, so her eyes were bent demurely on her
roses again. Again Bernice, leaning forward, intercepted the glance and
misinterpreted it. When Alex turned to her to repeat Aunt Jane's
explanation, she barely smiled, then relapsed into sulky silence.
Finding several other attempts at conversation received with only
monosyllables, he concluded that she was not in a mood to talk, and
naturally turned again to Lloyd.

He had not been out in the Valley for years, he told her. The last visit
he had made to his uncle, old Doctor Shelby, had been the summer that
the Shermans had come back to Lloydsboro from New York. He remembered
passing her one day on the road. She had squeezed through a hole in the
fence between two broken palings, and was trying to pull a little dog
through after her; a shaggy Scotch and Skye terrier.

"That was my deah old Fritz," she answered, "and I was probably running
away. I did it every chance I had."

"The next time I saw you," he continued, "I was driving along with
uncle. I was standing between his knees, I remember, proud as a peacock
because he was letting me hold the reins. I was just out of kilts, so it
was a great honor to be trusted with the lines. When we passed your
grandfather on his