onately. "I love those marks!" he exclaimed. "They make me feel
that we belong to each other."

"I'd be sorry to see _your_ hands different," said she, her eyes shining
upon his. "There are many things you don't understand about me--for
instance, that it's just those marks of work that make you so dear to me.
A woman may begin by liking a man because he's her ideal in certain ways,
but once she really cares, she loves whatever is part of him."

In addition to the reasons she had given for feeling "bolder" about her
"plebeian" lover, there was another that was the strongest of all. A few
months before, a cousin of her father's had died in Boston, where he was
the preacher of a most exclusive and fashionable church. He had endeared
himself to his congregation by preaching one Easter Sunday a sermon
called "The Badge of Birth." In it he proceeded to show from the
Scriptures themselves how baseless was the common theory that Jesus was
of lowly origin. "The common people heard Him gladly," cried the Rev.
Eliot Wilmot, "because they instinctively felt His superiority of birth,
felt the dominance of His lineage. In His veins flowed the blood of the
royal house of Israel, the blood of the first anointed kings of Almighty
God." And from this interesting premise the Reverend Wilmot deduced the
divine intent that the "best blood" should have superior
rights--leadership, respect, deference. So dear was he to his flock that
they made him rich in this world's goods as well as in love and honor.
The Wilmots of Saint X had had lively expectations from his estate. They
thought that one holding the views eloquently set forth in "The Badge of
Birth" must dedicate his fortune to restoring the dignity and splendor of
the main branch of the Wilmot family. But, like all their dreams, this
came to naught. His fortune went to a theological seminary to endow
scholarships and fellowships for decayed gentlemen's sons; he remembered
only Verbena Wilmot. On his one visit to the crumbling, weed-choked seat
of the head of the house, he had seen Verbena's wonderful hands, so
precious and so useless that had she possessed rings and deigned to wear
them she would not have permitted the fingers of the one hand to put them
on the fingers of the other. The legacy was five thousand dollars, at
four per cent., an income of two hundred dollars a year. Verbena invested
the first quarterly installment in a long-dreamed-of marble reproduction
of her right hand wh