t, though we ain't had a frost yet; and
as near's I can make out, she's got full red curtains hangin' up to her
windows. I ain't sure, for she don't open the blinds in that room till
I get away in the morning, and she shuts 'em before I get back at night.
Si don't know red from green, so he's useless in such matters. I'm going
home late to-night, and walk down on that side o' the river, so't I can
call in after dark and see what makes her house light up as if the sun
was settin' inside of it."

As a matter of fact, Lyddy was reveling in house-furnishing of a humble
sort. She had a passion for color. There was a red-and-white straw
matting on the sitting-room floor. Reckless in the certain possession
of twenty dollars a month, she purchased yards upon yards of turkey red
cotton; enough to cover a mattress for the high-backed settle, for long
curtains at the windows, and for cushions to the rockers. She knotted
white fringes for the table covers and curtains, painted the inside
of the fireplace red, put some pots, of scarlet geraniums on the
window-sills, filled newspaper rack with ferns and tacked it over an
ugly spot in the wall, edged her work-basket with a tufted trimming of
scarlet worsted, and made an elaborate photograph case of white crash
and red cotton that stretched the entire length of the old-fashioned
mantelshelf, and held pictures of Mr. Reynolds, Miss Elvira Reynolds,
George, Susy, Anna, John, Hazel, Ella, and Rufus Reynolds, her former
charges. When all this was done, she lighted a little blaze on the
hearth, took the red curtains from their hands, let them fall gracefully
to the floor, and sat down in her rocking-chair, reconciled to her
existence for absolutely the first time in her forty years.

I hope Mrs. Butterfield was happy enough in Paradise to appreciate and
feel Lyddy's joy. I can even believe she was glad to have died, since
her dying could bring such content to any wretched living human soul.
As Lydia sat in the firelight, the left side of her poor face in shadow,
you saw that she was distinctly harmonious. Her figure, clad in plain
black-and-white calico dress, was a graceful, womanly one. She had
beautifully sloping shoulders and a sweet wrist. Her hair was soft
and plentiful, and her hands were fine, strong, and sensitive. This
possibility of rare beauty made her scars and burns more pitiful, for
if a cheap chrome has smirch across its face, we think it a matter of no
moment, but we deplo