e
good to her she would sink rapidly down, from now on, to the common
level.

"I'll tell her, Aunt Ann," she said nonchalantly. "I'm right glad you
let me know." Then she wandered aimlessly back to the library and over
to the fireplace. Dejected and shrinking, she raised her eyes humbly
to her "Biggest of Them All" and deep in her soul sank the truth that
she, Cynthia Walden, once so gay and proud, was not the equal of Sandy
Morley! If he were brave and fine enough he might help her from very
pity--but if she were worthy, she must not permit him to do so.

Then it was that the first wave of actual soul-loneliness enveloped the
girl, and when youth recognizes such desolation something overpowers it
that no older person can ever understand.

And that very afternoon the great storm came that swept away so much
and opened the way to more.

It was four o'clock on that same day that Liza Hope passed Stoneledge
on the way down to the store. Liza was always just getting over having
a baby or just about to have one and her condition was now of the
latter character. Poor, misshapen, down-trodden creature! She
accepted her fate indifferently, not because she was hard or bitter,
but because she had never had a vision of anything else.

She paused near the chicken house where old Lily Ivy was hovering over
a belated brood whose erratic mother had mistaken the season of the
year.

"Howdy, Ivy! You-all has a right smart lot of fowls--but ain't it a
mighty bad time to hatch?"

"Dis yere hen allus was a fool hen," Ivy vouchsafed, "givin' trouble
an' agony to us-all."

"Does you-all like her the best?"

This question brought Ivy to her feet with a stare.

"The little doctor she done say as how we-all loves best the
baby-things what be right techersome. She be right, too, I reckon.
Them babies o' mine what died, and po' lil' Sammy what ain't clear in
his mind, is mighty nigh to me. I ain't never thought 'bout sich till
she cum. She steps up to my cabin now an' again an' her and me talks.
The Cup-o'-Cold-Water Lady I calls her, an' nights I lie an' think on
her, an' she comes an' brings my daid babies to me in dreams-like, an'
then I reach out for Sammy, an' I feel right comforted."

Ivy came close to her caller now and looked into the weary, sunken eyes
compassionately. Her contempt of the po' white trash faded before the
pathetic desolateness of Liza's glance.

"Liza Hope," she said, fixing the roving stare by