d in sheer astonishment, and gazed with open mouth and eyes upon
Nan, who was holding the glass to Sally's mouth, as caressingly as she
would to a sick child's.

The battle was won; won by a tone and a tear; won, as, ever since the
days of Goliath, so many battles have been won by the feebleness of
weapons, and not by their might.

When two days later, James Little, more than half unwillingly, spite
of his gratitude to Hetty, came to take his position as overseer
at "Gunn's," he was met at the great gate by his wife, who had been
watching there for him for an hour. He looked at her with undisguised
wonder. There was a light in her eyes, a color in her cheeks, he had not
seen there for many years. "Why, Sally!" he exclaimed, but gave no other
expression to his amazement. She understood.

"Oh, Jim!" she said, "it is like heaven here: they're all so kind. I
told you things would come round all right if we waited."

The new overseer found himself welcomed because he was Sally's husband,
and the strangeness of this was a bewilderment indeed. He could hardly
understand the atmosphere of cordial good feeling which seemed in so
short time to have grown up between his wife and all the household. He
had become so used to Sally's sweet sad face, that he did not know
how great a charm it held for others; and he had never seen in her the
manner which she now wore to every one. One day's kindly treatment had
been to her like one day's sunlight to a drooping plant.

Hetty was relieved and glad. All her misgivings had vanished; and she
found growing up in her heart a great tenderness toward Sally. She
recollected well the bright rosy face Sally had worn only a few years
before, and the contrast between it and her pale sorrow-stricken
countenance now smote Hetty whenever she looked at her. Her sympathy,
however, took no shape in words or caresses. She was too wise for that.
She simply made it plain that Sally's place in the family was to be a
fixed and a busy one.

"I shall look after the out-door things, Sally," she said. "I have done
that ever since father was so poorly, and I like it best. I shall trust
to you to keep the house going all straight. Old Nan isn't much of a
housekeeper, though she's a good cook: she needs looking after."

And so the new household entered on its first summer. The crops sprang
up, abundant and green: all the cattle throve and increased: the big
garden bloomed full of its old-fashioned flowers; its