protested. "We nearly starved
once."

Then she blushed--blushed most beautifully, thinking of a certain round
gold piece, still unspent.

"You are no burden at all, but a support. I shall have money enough
until this war ends. The Confederate Government, you know, Lucia, paid
me for the confiscations--not as much as they were worth, but as much as
I could expect--and we have been living on it."

The face of Lucia Catherwood altered. It expressed a singular tenderness
as she looked at Miss Grayson, so soft, so small and so gray.

"Charlotte," she said, "I wish that I were as good as you. You are never
excited, passionate or angry. You always know what you ought to do and
you always do it."

Miss Grayson looked up again and her eyes suddenly sparkled.

"You make a mistake, a great mistake, Lucia," she said. "It is only the
people who do wrong now and then who are really good. Those of us who do
right all the time merely keep in that road because we cannot get out of
it. I think it's a lack of temperament--there's no variety about us. And
oh, Lucia, I tell you honestly, I get so tired of keeping forever in the
straight and narrow path merely because it's easiest for me to walk that
way. I don't mean to be sacrilegious, but I think that all the rejoicing
in Heaven over the hundredth man who has sinned and repented was not
because he had behaved well at last, but because he was so much more
interesting than all the other ninety-nine put together. I wish I had
your temper and impulses, Lucia, that I might flash into anger now and
then and do something rash--something that I should be sorry for later
on, but which in my secret heart I should be glad I had done. Oh, I get
so tired of being just a plain, goody-goody little woman who will always
do the right thing in the most uninteresting way; a woman about whom
there is no delightful uncertainty; a woman on whom you can always
reckon just as you would on the figure 4 or 6 or any other number in
mathematics. I am like such a figure--a fixed quantity, and that is why
I, Charlotte Grayson, am just a plain little old maid."

She had risen in her vehemence, but when she finished she sank back into
her chair and a faint, delicate pink bloomed in her face. Miss Charlotte
Grayson was blushing! Lucia was silent, regarding her. She felt a great
flood of tenderness for this prim, quiet little woman who had, for a
rare and fleeting moment, burst her shell. Miss Grayson had always
a