e leaves were thickest and the damp
sweetness the richest. She wore her blue linen--it had been laundried
many times since that May morning when Sandy first saw her in it; but,
as Sally Taber, working under strict instructions, dried it in a pillow
case--the colour was still true blue and the shrinkage slight.

Many things had occurred during the past four months. Wonderful
breath-taking things; things that aroused many emotions and many
passions. For one thing, that brave company in the North, which Sandy
represented, had actually had the audacity and daring to start
operations on a splendid factory building! Smith Crothers was
sullenly, silently watching operations and making, apparently,
indifferent threats as to what might be expected to happen to any
Hollowite--"man, woman or child"--who turned from him and his interests
to the factory back of Lost Hollow.

"There ain't any known head to the concern," he said one night at the
County Club, "lest you count that youngster of Morley's as a head. I
leave it to you--can you-all trust a Morley?"

The solemn pause before Mason Hope ventured a "no" gave Crothers food
for reflection. Sandy was making his way into the confidence and
appreciation of his people. Slowly, to be sure, so slowly that often
he sighed disheartedly, but the change in attitude was noticeable and
Sandy knew it when the sun shone and Cynthia Walden deigned to speak a
pleasant word to him.

Beside the factory and near to it ground had been broken and a
foundation laid for a building about which people, especially mothers,
spoke in hushed voices.

"It can't be true," Liza Hope had said to Mrs. Tansey Moore one day as
they dropped in to Theodore Starr's church to take breath and a dip of
snuff. "A Home-school! that's what the Cup-o'-Cold-Water Lady said it
was, and when I axed her to say it plainer and not so polite, she done
'splain as how the chillens, our chillens, war to be gathered in from
everywhere--even factories,--and teached and--and mothered! That's her
word--mothered!"

"Don't them-all think us-all is--mothers?" Mrs. Moore sniffed
contemptuously. "Us as borned them reckons we-all is mothers."

"But it's this-er-way." Liza was Marcia Lowe's interpreter to the
cabin-folk and was gradually drawing them to the point where more than
one had gone voluntarily to Trouble Neck and, after a chat and a cup of
tea, had uttered the mystic word "youcum," which meant, "you call on
me." No