er father and she had apartments in Tom Hersey's Swanee Hotel. Mr.
Ravenel called often. She entered Montrose Academy "in order to remain
sixteen," she told him. This institution was but a year or two old. It
had been founded, at Ravenel's suggestion, "as a sort o' little sister
to Rosemont." Its principal, Miss Kinsington, with her sister, belonged
to one of Dixie's best and most unfortunate families.

"You don't bow down to Mrs. Grundy," something prompted Ravenel to say,
as he and Fannie came slowly back from a gallop in the hills.

"Yes, I do. I only love to tease her now and then. I go to the races,
play cards, waltz, talk slang, and read novels. But when I do bow down
to her I bow away down. Why, at Montrose, I actually talk on serious
subjects!"

"Do you touch often on religion? You never do to the gentlemen I bring
to see you."

"Why, Mr. Ravenel, I don't understand you. What should I know about
religion? You seem to forget that I belong to the choir."

"Well, politics, then. Don't you ever try to make a convert even in
that?"

"I talk politics for fun only." She toyed with her whip. "I'd tell you
something if I thought you'd never tell. It's this: Women have no
conscience in their intellects. No, and the young gentlemen you bring to
see me take after their mothers."

"I'll try to bring some other kind."

"Oh, no! They suit me. They're so easily pleased. I tell them they have
a great insight into female character. Don't you tell them I told you!"

"Do you remember having told me the same thing?"

She dropped two wicked eyes and said, with sweet gravity, "I wish it
were not so true of you. How did you like the sermon last evening?"

"The cunning flirt!" thought he that night, as his kneeling black boy
drew off his boots.

Not so thought John that same hour. Servants' delinquencies had kept him
from Sunday-school that morning and made him late at church. His mother
had stayed at home with her headache and her husband. Her son was
hesitating at the church-yard gate, alone and heavy-hearted, when
suddenly he saw a thing that brought his heart into his throat and made
a certain old mortification start from its long sleep with a great
inward cry. Two shabby black men passed by on plough-mules, and between
them, on a poor, smart horse, all store clothes, watch-chain, and
shoe-blacking, rode the president of the Zion Freedom Homestead League,
Mr. Cornelius Leggett, of Leggettstown. John went in. Fannie, se