little skirt but wholly and defiantly unshod save for a dusty white rag around one pink toe. A cunning little straw bonnet, with an ecru lace jabot dangled in her hand, and her big brown eyes reminded me of Jane's at her most inquisitive moments.

"If you was on a train, what did you git offen it here for?" she demanded of me, with both scorn and curiosity in her positive young voice.

"I don't know why," I answered weakly, not at all in the tone of a young-gallant-home-from-the-war mood I had intended to assume towards the first inhabitant of my native town to whom I addressed a remark.

"We was all a-goin' down to Hillsboro, to visit Aunt Bettie Pollard for a whole week, to Cousin Tom's wedding, but my family is too slow for nothing but a funeral. And Cousin James, he's worse. He corned for us ten minutes behind the town clock, and Mammy Dilsie had phthisic, so I had to fix the two twins, and we're done left. I wisht I didn't have no family!" And with her bare feet the young rebel raised a cloud of dust that rose and settled on my skirt.

"There they come now," she continued, with the pained contempt still rising in her voice.

And around the corner of the station hurried the family party, with all the haste they would have been expected to use if they had not, just two minutes earlier, beheld their train go relentlessly on down the valley to Hillsboro and the wedding celebration. I hadn't placed the kiddie, but I might have known, from her own description of her family, to whom she belonged.

First came Sallie Carruthers, sailing along in the serene way that I remembered to have always thought like a swan in no hurry, and in her hands was a wet box from which rose sterns protruded.

Next in the procession came Aunt Dilsie, huge and black and wheezing, fanning herself with a genteel turkey-tail fan, and carrying a large covered basket.

But the tail-piece of the procession paralyzed all the home-coming emotions that I had expected to be feeling, save that of pure hilarity. James Hardin was carrying two bubbly, squirmy, tousle-headed babies, on one arm, and a huge suitcase in the other hand, and his gray felt hat set on the back of his shock of black hair at an angle of deep desperation, though patience shone from every line of his strong, gaunt body, and I could see in the half light that there were no lines of irritation about his mouth, which Richard had said looked to him like that of the prophet Hosea, when I had shown him the picture that Father had had snapped of himself and the Crag, with their great string of quail, on one of their hunting-trips, just before Father died.

"Eve!" he exclaimed, when he suddenly caught sight of me, standing in the middle of the dusty road, with my impedimenta around me, and as he spoke he dropped both babies on the platform in a bunch, and the small trunk on the other side. Then he just stood and looked, and I had to straighten the roar that was arising in me at the sight of him into a conventional smile of greeting, suitable to bestow on an enemy.

But before the smile was well launched, Sallie bustled in and got the full effect of it.

"Why, Evelina Shelby, you darling thing, when did you come?" she fairly bubbled, as she clasped me in the most hospitable of arms, and bestowed a slightly powdery kiss on both my cheeks. I weakly and femininely enjoyed the hug, not that a man might not have—Sallie is a dear, and I always did like her gush, shamefacedly.

"She got often that train that left us, and she ain't got a bit of sense, or she wouldn't," answered the Blue Bunch for me, in a matter-of-fact tone of voice.

"What for did you all unpack outen the surrey, if you sawed the train go by?" she further demanded, with accusing practicality. "Don't you know when youse left?"

"Oh, Henrietta," exclaimed Sallie, looking at the young-philosopher with terrified helplessness. "Please don't mind her, Evelina. I don't understand her being my child, and nobody does, unless it was Henry's grandmother on his mother's side. You had heard of my loss?"

If I hadn't heard of the death of Henry Carruthers, Sallie's elaborate black draperies, relieved by the filmy exquisiteness of white crepe ruches at the neck and wrists, would have proclaimed the fact.

Suddenly, something made me look at Cousin James, as he stood calmly in the midst of Sallie's family and baggage, both animate and inanimate, and the laugh that had threatened for minutes fairly flared out into his placid, young prophet face.

"Oh, I am so sorry, Sallie, and so glad to see all of you that I'm laughing at the same time," I exclaimed to save myself from the awfulness of greeting a young widow's announcement of her sorrow in such an unfeeling manner. To cover my embarrassment and still further struggles with the laugh that never seemed to be able to have itself out, I bent and hugged up one of the toddlers, who were balancing against the Crag's legs, with truly feminine fervor.

"I'm glad to see you, Evelina," said Cousin James gently, and I could see that the billows of my mirth had got entirely past him.

I was glad he had escaped, and I found myself able to look with composure at his queer, long-tailed gray coat, which made me know that little old Mr. Pinkus, who had been Father's orderly all through the war, was still alive and tailoring in his tiny shop down by the post-office, though now that Father is dead he probably only does it for Cousin James. The two of them had been his only customers for years. And as I looked, I saw that the locks that curled in an ante-bellum fashion around the Crag's ears, were slightly sprinkled with gray, and remembered how he had loved and stood by Father, even in the manner of wearing Pinkus clothes; my heart grew very large all of a sudden, and I held out my hand to him.

He stood calmly in the midst of Sallie's family and baggage, both animate and inanimate.

"I'm glad to be at home," I said, gazing straight into his eyes, with a look of affection that you would have been proud of, Jane,—using unconsciously, until after I had done it, the warmth I had tried unsuccessfully on Richard Hall at the Astor, not forty-eight hours ago, but two thousand miles away. And it got a response that puzzles me to think of yet. It was just a look, but there was a thought of Father in it, also a suggestion of the glance he bestowed on Sallie's twins. I remembered that the Crag seldom speaks, and that's what makes you spend your time breathlessly listening to him.

"Well, come on, everybody, let's go home and undress, and forget about the wedding," came in Henrietta's positive and executive tones. "Let's go and take the strange lady with us. We can have company if we can't be it. She can sleep other side of me, next the wall."

I have never met anybody else at all like Henrietta Carruthers, and I never shall unless Jane Mathers marries and—I sincerely hope that some day she and Jane will meet.

And the next ten minutes was one of the most strenuous periods of time I ever put in, in all my life. I longed, really longed, to go home with Sallie and Henrietta, and sleep next the wall at Widegables with the rest of the Crag's collection. But I knew Glendale well enough to