raised to the dim eyes. "I can't stand to see that girl going
to places you can't go to. I simply can't, that's all."

"I could have gone, mother," Dixie remarked. "I didn't tell her, for I
knew exactly what she would say, but Hank Bradley met me on the way home
yesterday and offered to drive me over there. He says he knows all the
lumber crowd well."

"Hank Bradley--did he want to take you?" cried Mrs. Hart, "and you
wouldn't go?"

"I couldn't, mother. You know every girl that has ever kept company
with him has been talked about. I don't like him. I can't stand him.
He's a bad man, mother--a gambler, a drunkard, and an idler. He doesn't
care for the characters he has ruined. He's fast running through the
money his mother left him; he's no good."

"I don't know that you did exactly right," Mrs. Hart said, with the
indecision and bad logic into which her ill-fortune sometimes drew her.
"I know what he is well enough, but you are able to take care of
yourself, and you lose so many chances by being so particular. He knows
your true worth, and I've knowed men even as bad as he is to be reformed
by loving a good girl."

"I ain't in the reforming business," Dixie laughed. "I'd rather fight
crab-grass and pussley weeds, and I'm off now. You go back in the house
and set down and don't talk about the picnic. I sha'n't even think about
it. I never bother about anything when I get warmed up."

Without a word further the two parted. Mrs. Hart stood on the little
porch, and Dixie crossed the stretch of green meadow-land and climbed
over the rail-fence of her cotton-field. The long rows of succulent
plants, as high as the girl's knees, seemed breathing, conscious things
to which she was giving relief as she smoothly cut away the tenaciously
encroaching weeds and deep-rooted grass, the heaviest bunches of which
she took up and threshed against the hoe-handle and left in the sun to
die lest they be revived by some shower which would beat their roots
into the mellow soil again. The sun rose higher and higher till it was
poised almost directly over her head, and its rays beat more fiercely
down upon her. The almost breathless air was as hot as a gust from the
open door of a furnace. Her hands, in her heavy, knitted yarn gloves,
were moist and red.

In the distance, and nearer to the village, rose the white, pretentious
house of old Silas Welborne, the money-lender and the uncle of Hank
Bradley, to whom she owed the remaining pay