g on her face.

"I ain't got but three dollars," she said.

"I was gwine to buy my weddin' dress wif dat."

"But, Rachel," protested Ruth, in laughing remonstrance, "he has one
wife."

"Yes,'m. Pete Lawson ain't got no wife; but he ain't got but one arm,
neither. Whicht one would you take, Miss Rufe?"

"Pete," declared Ruth. "He's a good boy, what there is of him."

"Well, I guess I better notify him to-night," sighed Rachel; but she
held the love-letter on her knee and regretfully smoothed its crumpled
edges.

Ruth pushed back her chair from the table and crossed the wide hall to
the library.

It was a large room, with heavy wainscoting, above which simpered or
frowned a long row of her ancestors.

She stepped before the one nearest her and looked at it long and
earnestly. The face carried no memory with it, though it was her
father. It was the portrait of a handsome man in uniform, in the full
bloom of a dissipated youth. Her mother had seldom spoken of him, and
when she did her eyes filled with tears.

A few feet farther away hung a portrait of her grandfather, brave in a
high stock and ruffled shirt, the whole light of a bibulous past
radiating from the crimson tip of his incriminating nose.

Next him hung Aunt Elizabeth, supercilious, arrogant, haughty. Ruth
recalled a tragic day of her past when she was sent to bed for
climbing upon the piano and pasting a stamp on the red-painted lips.

She glanced down the long line: velvets, satins, jewels, and uniforms,
and, above them all, the same narrow face, high-arched nose, brilliant
dark eyes, and small, weak mouth.

On the table was a photograph of Carter. Ruth sighed as she passed it.
It was a composite of all the grace, beauty, and weakness of the
surrounding portraits.

She went to the fire and, sitting down on an ottoman, took two
pictures from the folds of her dress. One was a miniature in a small
old-fashioned locket. It was a grave, sweet, motherly face, singularly
pure and childlike in its innocence. Ruth touched it with reverent
fingers.

"They say I am like her," she whispered to herself.

Then she turned to the other picture in her lap. It was a cheap
photograph with an ornate border. Posed stiffly in a photographer's
chair, against a background which represented a frightful storm at
sea, sat Sandy Kilday. His feet were sadly out of focus, and his head
was held at an impossible angle by the iron rest which stood like a
half-concealed sk