store she sets by that po' wrack of a rag thing she's got
thar."

My mother's reply was so low that I did not catch it, but her tone was
not unpromising. I said nothing to her, or to anybody of what I had
heard. Only, of course, Musidora and I talked it all over. I assured her
that she was going to have a beautiful sister who would love her and
play with her and tell her stories of the wonderful city, and of how
happy we three should be together.

My father and mother went away to Richmond. They took the baby with
them, and Mary 'Liza and I were sent to my Aunt Eliza Carter's to stay
until they returned, when Cousin Molly Belle took us back home and told
my mother before my face that I had been as "good as gold."

"I am very glad to hear it," said my mother, giving me a squeeze and
kiss. "I was afraid she might be troublesome. She is not as steady as
Mary 'Liza, you know. I have something nice in my trunk for each of my
daughters."

She always spoke of us in that way, although Mary 'Liza was her niece,
and an orphan. She was seven now, and the pattern child of the county.
Pretty, too, with a fair skin and shiny braids of golden hair, and
innocent blue eyes, and dimpled arms, and fluffy, kittenish ways, while
I was as lean as a snake, as brown as a chinquapin, and as wild as a
hawk. I was used to hearing myself compared to all three. Mary 'Liza
could read in the New Testament without stopping to spell a word, at
three, and write in a copy-book at five, and do sums on the slate at
six, and at seven was as much company to my mother as if she had been
seventeen. In a word, my cousin was "a comfort." I was often called "a
plague."

Yet, as I can honestly affirm, I had never known, until this black day
when Cousin Molly Belle took me home, what it was to be envious. I was
not exactly fond of my cousin, yet we seldom disagreed openly. She wore
clean frocks and liked to stay indoors and piece bedquilts and knit
stockings and read aloud to my mother. I never willingly spent an hour
in the house when I could get out, and had odd plays of my own which I
kept secret from Mary 'Liza because I was sure she would be shocked, or
laugh at them. I fully recognized the claims of orphanhood to the
buttered side of life, and that a girl who had no father or mother
deserved to be cared for by everybody else.

My parents had arrived late at night, and the trunk was unpacked with
much ceremony the next morning. Under my mother's best ne