amp of ambition.

Her forehead was high--her whole bearing the unconscious one of a
born lady.

Romance--girlish, idealized romance--was her's to-day. A good
intentioned, but thoughtless romance--and therefore a weak one. And
worse still, one which, coupled with ambition, might be led to ruin.

Down through the tangled box-planted walks she strolled, swinging her
dainty hat of straw and old lace in her hand; on through the small
gate that bound the first yard, then through the shaded lawn, unkept
now and rank with weeds, but still holding the old trees which, in
other days, looked down over the well kept lawn of grass beneath. Now
gaunt hogs had rooted it up and the weeds had taken it, and the limbs
of the old trees, falling, had been permitted to lie as they fell.

The first fence was down. She walked across the road and took a path
leading through a cottonfield, which, protected on all sides by the
wood, and being on the elevated plateau on which the residence stood,
had escaped the severer frosts.

And so she stopped and stood amid it, waist high.

The very act of her stopping showed the romance of her nature.

She had seen the fields of cotton all her life, but she could never
pass through one in bloom and in fruit--the white and purple
blossoms, mingled with the green of the leaves and all banked over
billows of snowy lint,--that she did not stop, thrilled with the same
childhood feeling that came with the first reading of the Arabian
Nights.

She had seen the field when it was first plowed, in the spring, and
the small furrows were thrown up by the little turning shovels. Then,
down the entire length of the ridge the cotton-planter had followed,
its two little wheels straddling the row, while the small bull-tongue
in front opened the shallow furrow for the linty, furry, white seeds
to fall in and be covered immediately by the mold-board behind. She
had seen it spring up from one end of the ridge to the other, like
peas, then chopped out by the hoe, the plants left standing, each the
width of the hoe apart. Then she had watched it all summer, growing
under the Southern sun, throwing out limb above limb of beautiful
delicate leaves, drawing their life and sustenance more from the air
and sunshine above than from the dark soil beneath. Drawing it from
the air and sunshine above, and therefore cotton, silken, snowy
cotton--with the warmth of the sun in the skein of its sheen and the
purity of heaven in the f