ays looks the other way when we come by."

Tom looked the other way, too, watching anxiously for the first sight
of the new home. They reached it in good time, by a graveled driveway
leading up from the white pike between rows of forest trees; and there
was a second negro waiting to take the team, when they alighted at the
veranda steps.

The new house was a two-storied brick, ornate and palpably assertive,
with no suggestion of the homely country comfort of the old. Yet, when
his mother had wept over him in the wide hall, and there was time to go
about, taking it all in like a cat exploring a strange garret, it was
not so bad.

Or rather, let us say, there were compensations. The love of luxury is
only dormant in the heart of the hardiest barbarian; and the polished
floors and soft-piled rugs, the bath-room with its great china dish, and
the carpeted stair with the old grandfather clock ticking bravely on the
landing, presently began to thrum the tuneful chord of pride. Perhaps
Ardea Dabney would not laugh and say, "What a funny, _funny_ old place!"
as she had once said when the Major had brought her to the log-walled
homestead on the lower pike.

Still, there were incongruities--hopeless janglings of things married by
increasing prosperity, but never meant to be bedfellows in the
harmonious course of nature. One was the unblushing effrontery of the
new brick pairing itself brazenly with the venerable gray stone
manor-house on the adjoining knoll--impudence perceivable even to a
hobbledehoy fresh from the school desk and the dormitory. Another was
the total lack of sympathy between the housing and the housed.

This last was painfully evident in all the waking hours of the
household. Tom observed that his father escaped early in the morning,
and lived and moved and had his being in the industries at the lower end
of the valley, as of old. But his mother's occupation was quite gone.
And the summer evenings, sat out decorously on the ornate veranda, were
full of constraint and awkward silences, having no part nor lot with
those evenings of the older time on the slab-floored porch of the old
homestead on the pike.

But there were compensations again, even for Martha Gordon, and Tom
discovered one of them on the first Wednesday evening after his arrival.
The new home was within easy walking distance of Little Zoar, and he
went with his mother to the prayer-meeting.

The upper end of the pike was unchanged, and the l