al day for a picnic; mid-June in the heart of the Blue
Grass. On the rose-covered back porch of an old Southern mansion two
pretty girls were enthusiastically preparing for their day's outing.
It did not cloud their happiness that Claribel had to iron her own
shirt-waist for the occasion, or that the dainty lunch Wilma was
packing into the basket would leave the larder almost empty. They had
always been used to that order of things.

But old Mam Daphne, bumping her scrubbing-brush over the kitchen
floor, shook her woolly head sadly. She could remember the time when
every day was a gala day in the old mansion, because it was always
overflowing with guests to be entertained with free-handed
hospitality. Store-room and smoke-house were filled to overflowing
then, and there was a swarm of negro servants always in attendance. It
hurt the faithful old mammy's pride to see one of her young mistress's
daughters bending over the ironing-board, and to hear the other
exclaiming over the fried chicken and frosted spice cake in the picnic
basket, when such luxuries had once been their family's daily fare.
She was their only servitor, now, coming once a week to scrub and
clean.

[Illustration: "IT HURT THE FAITHFUL OLD MAMMY'S PRIDE"]

This morning she looked down the grass-grown walk to the broken-hinged
gate and sighed. She was looking through a bower of climbing roses,
but even the Gloire de Dijon, with its thousands of gold-hearted
blossoms, could not hide the fact that the old place was fast going to
decay.

To Claribel and Wilma, not yet out of their teens, repairs on the old
house did not seem half so important as their own personal ones of
shoe soles and skirt braids. It was their sister Agnes, ten years
older, who shouldered all such worries.

There had been girls in the country place where they lived, girls of
the best old families, too, who, feeling the pinch of poverty that
followed the changed conditions of the South after the war, had gone
away to teach school or learn typewriting. But Agnes, bringing up her
sisters in strict accordance with the old family traditions, carefully
weeded out of their young minds any such tendencies toward
self-support. With the city only fifteen miles away, where they might
have had the society and advantages they longed for, her prejudices
and family pride kept them in their cage of circumstances, waiting
helplessly like two irresponsible little canaries, for some outside
hand to