le again over her good luck."

Although it was "my girl" face to face, it was always "the old woman"
behind each other's back.

There was a knot-hole in the plank walls of the house. In spite of
Anne Marie's rheumatism they would never stop it up, needing it, they
said, for light and air. Jeanne Marie slipped her feet out of her
sabots and crept easily toward it, smiling, and saying "_Coton-Mai_!"
to herself all the way. She put her eye to the hole. Anne Marie was
not in the bed, she who had not left her bed for two months! Jeanne
Marie looked through the dim light of the room until she found her.

Anne Marie, in her short petticoat and nightsack, with bare legs
and feet, was on her knees in the corner, pulling up a plank,
hiding--peasants know hiding when they see it--hiding her money
away--away--away from whom?--muttering to herself and shaking her old
grayhaired head. Hiding her money away from Jeanne Marie!

And this was why Jeanne Marie leaned her head against the side of the
house and wept. It seemed to her that she had never known her twin
sister at all.

A CRIPPLED HOPE

You must picture to yourself the quiet, dim-lighted room of a
convalescent; outside, the dreary, bleak days of winter in a sparsely
settled, distant country parish; inside, a slow, smoldering log-fire,
a curtained bed, the infant sleeping well enough, the mother wakeful,
restless, thought-driven, as a mother must be, unfortunately,
nowadays, particularly in that parish, where cotton worms and
overflows have acquired such a monopoly of one's future.

[Illustration: "THE QUIET, DIM-LIGHTED ROOM OF A CONVALESCENT."]

God is always pretty near a sick woman's couch; but nearer even than
God seems the sick-nurse--at least in that part of the country, under
those circumstances. It is so good to look through the dimness and
uncertainty, moral and physical, and to meet those little black,
steadfast, all-seeing eyes; to feel those smooth, soft, all-soothing
hands; to hear, across one's sleep, that three-footed step--the
flat-soled left foot, the tiptoe right, and the padded end of
the broomstick; and when one is so wakeful and restless and
thought-driven, to have another's story given one. God, depend upon
it, grows stories and lives as he does herbs, each with a mission of
balm to some woe.

She said she had, and in truth she had, no other name than "little
Mammy"; and that was the name of her nature. Pure African, but bronze
rather t