ve."

And this time she lifted up her face and, without a thought, gave him a
kiss.

CHAPTER V

"Hertha," Ellen said the next afternoon, "have you any plans for the
future?"

School had just closed, Miss Patty had given her maid an afternoon off,
and the two sisters were walking together toward their home.

"Any plans?" Hertha was startled. "I thought our plans were made for
good when we came here."

"I hope not!" Ellen declared decidedly. "I'm willing to work here now
for next to nothing, but I shall try for a bigger job some day; and you,
honey, you don't always want to be Miss Patty's maid."

"I don't know; why shouldn't I?"

"This is a dull life for you, Hertha. Sometimes I think we ought never
to have come here."

"Ellen!"

"It's different for mammy and me; we're older."

"You're only four years older than I."

"I think that really I'm a great deal older than you. But I get so much
more out of Merryvale than you do. The people who live in these
cabins--well, they're problems to me, human problems that I'm trying to
solve. There's hardly a home that hasn't in it some boy or girl whom I'm
watching almost as though he were my child. I'm working for the
children, Hertha, the colored children who will soon be men and women
and who ought to have just as good a chance as white children in this
world."

"They never will in America."

"I'm not so sure," Ellen answered.

They were walking in the pine region back of the river. To a newcomer
many of the cabins would have looked untidy; the ubiquitous hog would
have been pronounced a public nuisance, and the facilities for washing
inadequate; but to Ellen the settlement in which she had been working
for five years was a garden of progress, and if a few of the plants made
a determined stand to remain weeds, she did not let them hide her
numerous hardy flowers. In her heart she meant ultimately to uproot
them. Old Mr. Merryvale would never stand for severity, but the next
generation was at work upon the place and might be induced to aid her in
exiling the degenerate few.

"I love it here!" Ellen exclaimed, stopping and looking about her. "I
never worked in a school before where it was so easy to get at the
people, or where the children seemed so anxious to learn. Do you know, I
suppose no one would believe me if they heard it, but I'm glad that I'm
colored."

"Why not?" Hertha asked sharply. "If you love your work and these
people, why should you