the store on an errand, returned, bringing a
letter. A letter, that was not a circular about fertilizers, or one of
those polite and persuasive invitations to vote for a certain man for a
town office, which penetrated even to the Hand's little gray kennel of a
house toward election-time, was such a rarity that Mrs. Hand forgot the
bread just done in the oven, and sank down wearily on the door-step to
read it.

"Well, you ain't a-goin'," she said to Drusilla, who stood quite
patiently by, with a faint color in her pale face. "No, sir, you ain't
a-goin' one step. She was too stuck-up to come here when she was alive,
'n' you ain't a-goin' to take care of her children dead, 'n' that's the
end of it."

Druse made no reply. She never did. Instead, she bent her thin, childish
back, and pulled the burning bread out of the oven.

None the less, Druse went.

It was all Pop's work. Pop was meek and soft; he cried gently of a
Sunday evening at church, the tears trickling down the furrowed
leather-colored skin into the sparse beard, and on week-days he was wont
to wear a wide and vacuous smile; yet somehow, if Pop said this or that
should be, it was,--at least in the little house on the edge of the
village.

And Pop had said Druse should go. For after all, the case is hard, even
if one _is_ occupying a lofty position to rural eyes as a carpenter in
"York," with a city wife, who has flung her head contemptuously at the
idea of visiting his ne'er-do-weel brother; the case is hard, no matter
how high one's station may be, to be left with three motherless
children, over-fond of the street, with no one to look after them, or
make ready a comfortable bit of dinner at night. And so, considering
that Elviry was fourteen, and stronger than Druse, any way, and that
John Hand had promised to send a certain little sum to his brother every
month, as well as to clothe Druse, Druse went to live in the fourth flat
in the Vere de Vere.

Perhaps that was not just the name, but it was something equally
high-sounding and aristocratic; and it seemed quite fitting that one of
the dirty little cards that instructed the postman and the caller,
should bear the pleasing name, "Blanche de Courcy." But Druse had never
read novels. Her acquaintance with fiction had been made entirely
through the medium of the Methodist Sunday School library, and the
heroines did not, as a rule, belong to the higher rank in which, as we
know, the lords and ladies are all