you what I find out," agreed Johnnie heartily. "I
reckon you'll want to know how the work seems to me at the side of such
as I was used to in the mountains; but I hope you won't inquire how long
it took me to learn, for I'm afraid I'm going to make a poor record. If
you was to ask me how much I was able to earn there, and how much back
on Unaka, I could make a good report for the mill on that, because
that's all that's the matter with the mountains--they're a beautiful
place to live, but a body can't hardly earn a cent, work as they may."

Johnnie forgot herself--she was always doing that--and she talked freely
and well. It was as inevitable that she should be drawn to Gray Stoddard
as that she should desire the clothing and culture Miss Lydia possessed.
For the present, one aspiration struck her as quite as innocent as the
other. Stoddard had not yet emerged from the starry constellations among
which she set him, to take form as a young man, a person who might
indeed return her regard. Her emotions were in that nebulous, formative
stage when but a touch would be needed to show her whither the regard
tended, yet till that touch should come, she as unashamedly adored Gray
as any child of five could have done. It was not till they were well
down the road to Cottonville that she realized the bald fact that she, a
mill girl, was riding in an automobile with one of the mill owners.

She was casting about for some reasonable phrase in which to clothe the
statement that it would be better he should stop the car and let her
out; she had parted her lips to ask him to take the wheel, when they
rounded a turn and came upon a company of loom-fixers from the village
below. Behind them, in a giggling group, strolled a dozen mill girls in
their Sunday best. Johnnie had sight of Mandy Meacham, fixing eyes of
terrified admiration upon her; then she nodded in reply to Shade
Buckheath's angry stare, and a rattle of wheels apprized her that a
carriage was passing on the other side. This vehicle contained the
entire Hardwick family, with Lydia Sessions turning long to look her
incredulous amazement back at them from her seat beside her
brother-in-law.

It was all over in a moment. The loom-fixers had debouched upon the
long, wooden bridge which crossed the ravine to their quarters; the
girls were going on, Mandy Meacham hanging back and staring; a tree
finally shut out Miss Sessions's accusing countenance.

"Please stop and let me out he