"

For the first time I raised my eyes. "I'll walk anywhere except along
the road-to-what-might-have-been," I said, and my voice was quite
steady.

Her glance dropped to her plate. Then she looked across the vase of
chrysanthemums into Miss Mitty's face.

"Ben and I used to play together, Aunt Mitty," she said, offering the
information as if it were the most pleasant fact in the world, "when I
lived on Church Hill."

A flush rose to Miss Mitty's cheeks, and passed the next instant, as if
by a wave of sympathy, into Miss Matoaca's.

"I hoped, Sally, that you had forgotten that part of your life,"
observed the elder lady stiffly.

"How can I forget it, Aunt Mitty? I was very happy over there."

"And are you not happy here, dear?" asked Miss Matoaca, hurt by the
words, and bending over, she smelt a spray of lilies-of-the-valley that
had lain beside her plate.

"Of course I am, Aunt Matoaca, but one doesn't forget. I met Ben first
when I was six years old. Mamma and I stopped at his house in a storm
one night on our way over to grandmama's. We were soaking wet, and they
were very kind and dried us and gave us hot things to drink, and his
mother wrapped me up in a shawl and sent me here with mamma. I shall
always remember how good they were, and how he broke off a red geranium
from his mother's plant and gave it to me."

As she told her story, Miss Mitty watched her attentively, the
expression of faint wonder in her eyes and her narrow eyebrows, and her
pleasant, rather pained smile etched delicately about her fine, thin
lips. Her long, oval face, suffused now by an unusual colour, rose above
the quaint old coffee urn, on which the Fairfax crest, belonging to her
mother's family, was engraved. If any passion could have been supposed
to rock that flat, virgin bosom, I should have said that it was moved by
a passion of wounded pride.

"Is your coffee right, Mr. Starr? Have you cream enough?" she enquired
politely. "Selim, give Mr. Starr a partridge."

My coffee was right, and I declined the bird, which would have stuck in
my throat. The united pride of the Blands and the Fairfaxes, I told
myself, could not equal that possessed by a single obscure son of a
stone-cutter.

"If you are as hungry as I am, you are famished," observed Sally, with a
gallant effort to make a semblance of gayety sport on a frozen
atmosphere. "Aunt Matoaca, have pity and give me a muffin."

Muffins were passed by Miss Matoaca; waffles we