ke he means something by--by
keeping it a secret? It wasn't sudden, for Dora says he told her some
time back."

"Go over there? Huh! You make me smile, Liz. You didn't even get an
invitation to the wedding, or a chance to make a present, and yet you
are bothered about whether you ought to call or not. As for me, I'll not
put foot across his door-sill--not even if he asked me. No, not even if
he come begging me on bended knee. Huh! I guess not!"

"And why not?" Lizzie Trott asked, after a momentous pause.

"Because"--and as she answered Jane's eyes held a steely gleam as from
some inner light of self-accusation that refused to be quenched even by
fear of giving offense--"because if he did ask me I'd know the poor boy
was still blind to what everybody else knows and what he would have
known long ago if he had been as coarse as other men, or if folks had
not liked him too much to talk plain to him. No, I'll not go there. I
wouldn't know what to say, nohow. Huh! You wouldn't, either, I'll bet."

"You are not helping me much." Lizzie Trott readjusted the imitation
tortoise-shell comb in her rather lifeless hair and gave a sigh, which
was followed by a moan, half of anger, half of despair.

"I think I can take a nap now," Jane said. "I feel drowsy-like. If--if
you have finished, I wish you would pull the shades down. Tell Dora I
don't want anything to eat and not to bring it up. She will wake me if
she does."

Mrs. Trott rose sullenly and drew the shades down. She cast a parting
look at Jane, and was on the threshold when from the bed came these
words:

"Liz, do me a favor, please do, like a good girl. If Jim Stacy comes
again, don't let him know I'm up here. Tell him some lie--tell him I am
in Atlanta. He is dead broke and always drinking and jealous. I'm too
sick to talk to him, and, sick or not, he'd come right up. I've got to
get rid of him, that is certain."

Making some sort of promise, Lizzie went into her own room and sat down
in a rocking-chair. Nervously she swung back and forth for a few
minutes, and then sat still, her eyes fixed on vacancy.

CHAPTER XXV

One morning shortly after this, while Tilly was busy cleaning up the
house, she noticed a little girl at the front fence near the gate. The
child was oddly dressed, wearing a skirt that was too long for her,
stockings so large that they hung in folds about her thin ankles, a
shirt-waist which had been cut down from a woman's size and clumsily