Doctor Hathern's daughters

by Mary Jane Holmes

PART I—LIFE AT THE ELMS.

Chapter I—Annie’s Story.
THE DAUGHTERS.

There are three of us, Fanny and Annie (that is myself) and Katy, who is our half-sister and several years our junior. Her mother, a blue-eyed, golden-haired little woman from New Orleans, lived only a year after she came to us, and just before she died she took my sister’s hand and mine, and putting one of her baby’s between them, said, “Be kind to her as I would have been kind to you had I lived. God bless you all.”

We were only nine years old, but we accepted the trust as something sacred, and little Katy, who inherited all of her mother’s marvelous beauty and sweetness of disposition, never missed a mother’s love and care, and was the pet and darling of our household. Fanny and I are twins,—familiarly known as “Fan-and-Ann,”—and as unlike each other as it is possible for twins to be. Fan, who always passes for the elder, is half a head taller than I am, and very beautiful, with a stateliness and imperiousness of manner which would befit a queen, while I am shy and reticent and small, and only one has ever called me handsome. But his opinion is more to me than all the world, and so I am content, although as a young girl, I used sometimes to envy Fan her beauty, and think I would rather be known as “the pretty and proud Miss Hathern” than “the plain and good one,” a distinction often made between us, and one which I knew made me the more popular of the two.

Our home, which was sometimes called “The Elms,” on account of the great number of elm trees around it, was in the part of Virginia that felt the shock of the war the most, and when the thunder of artillery was shaking the hills around Petersburg and the air was black with shot and shell and the gutters ran red with human blood, Fanny and I, with little Katy between us, sat with blanched faces listening to the distant roar,—she thinking of the cause she had so much at heart and feared was lost, and I of the thousands of homes made desolate by the dreadful war which, it seemed to me, need never to have been. As we were southern born we naturally sympathized with the south,—that is, Fanny did,—while our father, who was born under the shadow of Bunker Hill, and rarely had any very decided opinions except for peace and good will everywhere, scarcely knew on which side he did stand. Both were right and both were wrong, he said, and he opposed secession with all his might, insisting that there must be some better method of settling the difficulty than by plunging the nation into a sea of carnage.

He was for “peace at any price,” and held the flag as a sacred thing, and at last when war was upon us, he reverently laid away in the garret the one with which we were wont to celebrate the Fourth of July, and night and morning prayed for both sides,—not that either might be victorious, but that they might settle the difficulty amicably and go home.

My mother, whom I can scarcely remember, was a Charlestonian, who believed in slavery as a divine institution, and was the kindest and gentlest of mistresses to the few negroes she brought with her to her Virginia home. For myself I scarcely knew what I did believe, except as I was swayed by a stronger spirit than my own, and that spirit was Fan’s. She was an out and out rebel, as we were called, and lamented that instead of a girl of thirteen she was not a man to join the first company of volunteers which went from Lovering. Situated as we were, near the frontier, we were fair prey for the soldiers on both sides, and they came upon us like the locusts of Egypt and spoiled us almost as badly as the Egyptians were spoiled by the Israelites, but from neither north nor south did we ever suffer a personal indignity. This was largely owing to our father’s incomparable tact in dealing with them. It seemed to me that he was always watching for them, and when he came in from the street, or the gate where he spent a great deal of his time, I could tell to a certainty whether we were to expect a Federal or a Confederate before he spoke a word. If it were the latter he came to me and said, “Annie, there are soldiers in town and if they come here, as they may, stay in your room until they are gone.” If it were the boys in blue, he went to Fan, but did not tell her to stay in her room. He knew she would not if he did, and he would say in his most conciliatory way, “Daughter, I think there are some Federals in the woods, and if they come here as they may because the house is large and handy, try and be civil to them, and don’t be afraid.”

“Afraid!” Fan would answer, with a flash in her black eyes. “Do you think I would be afraid if the entire northern army stood at our door!”

Then she would hurry off to warn the blacks in the kitchen and see that the coffee and sugar and tea were hidden away, while father walked down to the gate to receive the foremost of his unwelcome guests. With a courtly wave of the hand, which he might have borrowed from kings, he would say, “What can I do for you to-day? I suppose you are hungry, but we have been visited so often that we have not much left. Still I think we can give you something; but, gentlemen, I beg of you not to annoy or frighten my daughters. They are very young and their mother is dead.”

Whether it was what he said, or the way he said it, or both, his wishes so far as we were concerned were respected, and neither Fanny nor I ever came near a boy in blue or a boy in grey that he did not touch his cap to us, and when Fan’s sharp tongue got the better of her, as it often did, they only laughed, and told her to “dry up,” a bit of slang she did not then understand and resented hotly as a Yankee insult. They took our poultry and eggs and fruit and flour and finally all our negroes, except Phyllis, who had her bundle made up to go, and then found that her love for “Ole Mas’r” and the young “misseses” was stronger than her love for freedom.

On one occasion they took Black Beauty, Fan’s riding pony, but sent it back within a few hours. This was toward the close of the war, when Virginia was full of Federal troops, and for one day and night our place was turned into a kind of barracks by a company whose leader, Col. Errington, occupied our best room and took his meals with us. He was a tall, handsome man, with a splendid physique and the most polished manners I ever saw. But there was a cynical look about his mouth and a cold, hard expression in his grey eyes, which I did not like, while Fan detested him. She was then a beautiful girl of nearly seventeen, with a haughty bearing and frankness of speech which amused the northern officer, to whom she expressed her mind very freely, not only with regard to his calling, but also with regard to himself. But he took it all good-humoredly, and when he went away he kissed his hand to her, while to me he simply bowed.

“The wretch! How dare he!” Fanny said, with a stamp of her foot.

But she watched him until he disappeared from sight in the woods, through which there was a short cut in the direction of Petersburg. Most of his men followed him, but a few stragglers lingered behind for the sake of whatever they could find in the shape of eatables, and when at last they departed, Phyllis, who had been doing battle with them over a quantity of butternuts which she claimed as her special property, came running to the house with the startling information that “one dem blue coats done took off Miss Fanny’s pony, who kicked and snorted jes ’s if he knowed ’twas a fetched Yank who had cotched him.”

Rushing to the door we saw the pony going down the lane, or rather standing in the lane, for he had planted his forefeet firmly on the ground, and with mulish obstinacy refused to move. A sharp cut from the whip, however, brought him to terms, and he went galloping off with his heels in the air quite as often as upon terra firma. I think Fan followed him bareheaded for nearly a mile, but all her calls and entreaties were in vain. Black Beauty was gone, and she cried herself into a headache which lasted until night, when, just as we were sitting down to supper, Phyllis came near dropping the hot corn cakes she was putting upon the table in her surprise and delight as she exclaimed, “Bress de Lord, dar’s Black Beauty now.”

Looking from the window we saw a soldier in blue leading him toward the house and trying hard to hold him as he minced and pranced and shook his head in his delight to be home again. In a moment he was at the open door where he often came to be fed with sugar or cookies and Fan’s arms were around his neck and she was talking to him as if he was human and could understand her, while he whinnied in reply and rubbed his head against her face.

“Col. Errington sent you this with his compliments,” the soldier said, handing a note to Fan, which was as follows:

“Dear Miss Hathern

“I have just learned of the abduction of your pony, and am very sorry for the anxiety it must have caused you. I am sure it is yours, as you ran so far after him, and for that reason I should like to keep him for myself. But honor compels me to send him back.

“Hoping that you will not add the sin of thieving to my other enormities and that in the near future we may meet as friends instead of foes,

“I am, yours very truly,

“George W. Errington.”

Fan’s first impulse, after reading this, was to tear it up, but she changed her mind, and I heard her tell Phyllis to give the soldier some supper, if he wanted it.

“I suppose the tramp is hungry; they always are,” she said, apologetically, as her eyes wandered across the orchard to the enclosure on the hillside where, under the pine trees, our boy in grey was lying, with a boy in blue beside him.

That night I saw Fan put Col. Errington’s note in a little box on our dressing bureau, where she kept her few trinkets, but his name was not mentioned between us until after the fall of Richmond, when Jack Fullerton, our neighbor, who had been in the war and who knew about Fan’s pony and the officer, whom he teasingly called Fan’s Yankee, brought a Washington paper in which we read that Col. Errington, who was so severely wounded at Petersburg, was recovering rapidly and would soon be able to be moved into his house on Franklin Square.

“I suppose you are very glad that your gallant Colonel is getting well,” Jack said, and Fan replied, “Of course I am. Do you think me a murderess that I want any man to die.”

“I thought at one time you would like to exterminate the entire Federal army,” Jack said, and Fan replied, “So I would, and I have no love for them now; but can’t a body change some of his views?”

And, truly, Fan’s views were greatly changed from what they were at the beginning of the war, to which time I must go back for a little and tell of the boy in grey and the boy in blue, who brought the change and who, though dead, have much to do with this story.

Chapter II—An Episode.
THE BOY IN GREY AND THE BOY IN BLUE.

I have written of Dr. Hathern’s daughters, but have said nothing of his son, our brother Charlie, who was four years our senior and little more than a boy when the war broke out. Too young by far to join the army, father and I said. But Fan thought differently, and when the clouds of strife grew darker and denser and there were calls for more recruits she urged him on until at last he enlisted and we saw him with others march away on the Monday after the Easter of ’62. How handsome he was in his new uniform, and how proud we were of him, he was so tall and straight, with such a sunny smile on his boyish face and in his laughing blue eyes.

“Bress de boy; he look like Sol’mon in all his best clos’,” Phyllis said, regarding him admiringly when he put them on, “an’ though I spec’s I’se a mighty bad un seein’ I’se a nigger and one of Linkum’s folks, I hope he’ll beat ’em sho’.”

“Beat them! Of course we shall!” Fan said, putting her arms around Charlie’s neck and laying a hand on the shoulder of Jack Fullerton, who had also enlisted. “Of course we shall beat them. The Northerners are all cowards. One or two battles will end the matter and you will come marching home covered with glory.”

She was talking mostly to Jack, flashing upon him a look from her bright eyes which would have made a less brave man face the cannon’s mouth. Jack had been my hero since my earliest remembrance, although I knew that he preferred Fan, who was tall and fair and comely, while I was short and dark and homely. It was mainly owing to her influence that he had enlisted, and he was to dine with us that Easter Day as his father was dead and his mother, who was an invalid, was away at some springs. How bright we made the house with the lilies Charlie was so fond of, saying they made him think of his mother and the angels, and I never see one now, nor inhale its perfume, that it does not bring Charlie back to me as he was that last day at home when there were great bowls of them on the mantels and stands and dinner table, which was loaded with every delicacy Phyllis could devise. The rooms looked as if decked for a bridal, but they seemed like a funeral, we were all so sad, except Fan. She was in the wildest of spirits and talked of the next Easter when the war would be over, and Charlie with us again, wearing shoulder straps may be, or at all events covered with honor as a soldier who had done his duty.

“You are not going to be shot, but to shoot somebody,” she said, patting him on his back. “And we’ll trim the house up better than it is to-day, and Phyllis shall make her best plum pudding, and I shall be so proud of you,” she added, throwing her arms around his neck, and kissing him lovingly.

The next morning he went away and we saw him marching by to the sound of the fife and drum, while I cried as if my heart would break, but Fanny stood upon the horse block by the gate and sent kisses after him until a turn in the road hid him from our sight. We heard from him often during the summer, for many men from our county were in the same regiment, and so, from one and another and from himself word came to us that he was well and had as yet seen no actual fighting, though very anxious to do so. Then the tone of his letters changed a little and he was not quite so ready to fight.

“I tell you what, Fan-and-Ann,” he wrote, “the boys in blue are not such milksops as you think. I have seen quite a lot of ’em, and they are a pretty good sort after all, and they gave me tobacco and hard tack and a newspaper, and said they’d nothing against me personally, but they had enlisted to lick just such upstarts and were going to do it. I’d smile to see them.”

“And so would I,” Fan said, with the utmost scorn, “lick us indeed! I wish I were a man!”

She was growing more bitter every day, and when one evening Phyllis came to me privately and said there was a half-starved Federal soldier hiding in the corn-field, I did not dare tell Fan, but went to him with Phyllis after dark and carried him bread and milk and a blanket to cover him and an umbrella to shield him from the rain. The third day he went away and I never heard from him again until the war was over, when I received a badly written letter, directed wrong side up and signed James Josh, who thanked me for my kindness which he had never forgotten. I passed the letter to Fan, who surprised me by saying, “Yes, I knew all about it; I saw you steal off into the corn-field and saw you feeding that poor wretch, and only a thought of Charlie and what I’d wish someone to do for him kept me from giving notice that a Yankee was hiding in our field. I knew when he went away and saw you and Phyllis coddle him up with sandwiches and hoe-cake and father’s old coat, and you took me to task for flirting in front of the house with Jack Fullerton, who was home on a furlough, when I was really trying to keep him as long as possible so as to let your James Josh get out of the way.”

Fanny was greatly softened at that time and not much like the fierce, outspoken girl who kept us up to fever heat during the second year of the war when the weeks and months dragged so slowly until at last it was winter and news came of the terrible battle of Fredericksburg, when the woods were filled with the dead and dying and the river ran red with blood. Three days after the battle they brought Charlie to us dead, with a bullet in his side and a look of perfect peace on his young face, smooth yet and fair as a girl’s. Some of his friends had found him in the woods, and rather than leave him there had at the risk of their own lives managed to have him carried across the country until at the close of the third day he lay in our best room where so many lilies had been when he went away, but which now echoed to father’s sobs and mine as we bent over our dead boy. Fan never shed a tear, but in a cold, hard voice told the men where to put the body, and then with a start, exclaimed, “What does this mean?” and she pointed to his uniform, which was not the grey he had worn away, but the blue she so hated, and which was much too small for him.

“Some thief exchanged with him, for see, there is no hole where the bullet struck him,” she continued, looking at the coat which was stained with blood, but whole. “Phyllis, come here,” she went on, while father and I sat dumb and helpless, “take off that garb of a dog and put his own clothes on him, his best ones, hanging in his room.”

Phyllis obeyed, and when the soiled and bloody garments lay upon the floor, Fan said, “give me the tongs, I am going to burn them up.”

Then father arose and reaching out his shaking hands saved the blue uniform from the flames.

“Wait, Fan,” he said; “there may be something in the pockets which will tell us whose clothes they are. Remember there are more aching hearts than ours.”

He was feeling in the trousers pockets where securely pinned in the bottom of one was the half sheet of paper which we had fastened in the top of Charlie’s cap because it was too large. The paper was written over in a scrawly hand which was not Charlie’s, and Fan read it aloud with the tears streaming down her cheeks, just as mine are falling now, as I copy it verbatim:

“Dear Father and Fan-and-Ann:

“I am dying under a tree in the woods with a bullet in me and a boy’s cap stuffed into the wound to keep the blood back, while I tell him what to write. Lucky Fan-and-Ann thought to put that paper in my cap. The boy, who is a Yankee, found me and brought me some water and covered me with his coat when I got cold and stuffed his cap into the hole and cried over me, and I cried too, and we’ve talked it over and are as sorry as we can be—about the war, I mean. I hope I didn’t kill anybody and he hopes he didn’t, and his left hand is almost shot away and hurts him awful, but he’s going to stick to me till I’m dead. Then I’ve told him how to find his way to you and tell you about me, and you must take care of him and not let them get him. He don’t want to go to prison, and I don’t want to have him, and he’s going to change clothes with me so as to look like a confederate. We’ve said the Lord’s Prayer together, and Now I lay me, and the Creed, and dearly beloved, and everything we could think of and he knows them just as I do and I reckon I’m all right with God, only I’d like to die at home. It’s getting dark and the boy is tired and I am faint. Kiss little Katy for me. I wish I could see you all again.

“Good-bye, be kind to the boy. Give my respects to Phyllis.

“Charlie.”

This was the letter and I need not say that the blue uniform was not burned; neither did I know what became of it until after the funeral was over and I had courage to go into my brother’s room where I found it hanging on the wall and over it the Stars and Stripes which Fan had brought from their hiding place and put above the faded blue, from which the blood stains could not be effaced, although Phyllis had washed it two or three times. Every day Fan and I went in and looked at it and cried over it and talked of The Boy and wondered who he was and when, if ever, he would come.

“What shall you do if he does?” I asked her once, but she only glared at me like a tiger and I was glad to escape from the scornful gleam of her eyes.

And thus the weeks glided into months and it was spring again and the Virginia woods were lovely in their dress of green; the robins were building their nests in the trees and the lilies we were to lay on Charlie’s grave at Easter were just breaking into bloom. Father had gone to visit a patient, Katy was at school, and Fan and I sat by the dining-room fire when Phyllis came in, and, cautiously shutting the door, said in a mysterious whisper, “He’s done come.”

“Who has come?” I asked, and Phyllis replied, “The Boy, to be sho’; him you’re spectin’, honey, Mas’r Charles’s boy, and oh, de Lord, such a bag of bones, and so scar’t for fear he’ll be took.”

“Where is he?” Fan asked, springing to her feet.

“In my cabin, in course. Whar should he be?” was Phyllis’s answer, and in a moment Fan and I were on our way to the cabin, the door of which we could not open.

“Go to the windy behine de cabin, honey,” Phyllis said, puffing after us like an engine.

We went to the rear window, which was open, and through which Fan darted like a cat, while I followed almost as quickly. Against the door a most heterogenous mass of furniture was piled. A table, two wooden chairs, a wash tub, iron kettle, stewpan, skillet and billet of wood, while a large nail was driven over the latch.

“What upon earth is this for. I should think you were shutting out an army,” Fan said, and Phyllis, who had managed to squeeze through the window, replied, “An’ so I is, de Federate’s army, too. I’se not gwine to have him took, an’ he beggin’ of me not to; I’ll spill my heart’s blood first.”

She had seized a big rolling pin which she flourished energetically, looking as if she might keep a whole regiment at bay.

“Move those things and open that door,” Fan said authoritatively, and then we turned our attention to the boy, lying on Phyllis’s bed, a mere skeleton, with masses of light curly hair and great sunken blue eyes which looked up at us so pitifully as we bent over him.

“You won’t let ’em get me?” he whispered, with a faint smile, “I am so sick and my head aches so, and my hand is so bad. He said you were good, but I didn’t know there were two of you; which is Fan-an-Ann?”

Fan and I looked curiously at each other a moment; then, remembering that Charlie always spoke of us as Fan-an-Ann, and that it was so written in the letter, we understood his mistake. But it was Fan who answered, for I could only stand and cry over this wreck of a boy, with Charlie’s battered clothes upon him, too long and large every way, and covered with soil and blood stains. What remained of his left hand was bound in a dirty rag and quivered with pain as it lay on the coarse blanket.

“What shall we do?” I asked at last, and Fan answered in her imperious way, which always made one feel small.

“Do! Go to the house and get Charlie’s bed ready, and bring me his dressing gown and a shirt and drawers from his trunk. This is no time to cry.”

I knew then that Lee’s entire army could not wrest that boy from Fan, who helped Phyllis remove his stiff garments and wash the aching limbs, scarcely larger than sticks, and who herself undid the bandage from the wounded hand which she bathed so carefully and bound up so skillfully in the lint and linen which I brought her; then, when all was done, she wrapped a blanket around him and took him in her own strong arms, not daring to trust him to Phyllis, who weighed a hundred and eighty and was apt to stumble. It was curious to see Fan, who had been so bitter against the north, carrying that Yankee boy up to the house and laying him on Charlie’s bed, at the foot of which, on the wall, his own uniform was hanging. He saw it at once, for his eyes seemed to see everything, and with a smile on his white face, he said, “Why, there’s my old clothes. They were too small for him but I managed to get them on him as he told me, and I pinned the letter in his pockets, thinking if he got to you and I didn’t, you’d know; did you find it?”

“Yes,” Fan answered, “and now tell me why you were so long in coming?”

He was very weak and could only talk at intervals in whispers, as he replied, “I lost the way and was sick in a negro’s cabin ever so long. They took as good care of me as they could and hid me away when danger was near,—sometimes under the bed, and once in the pounding barrel, and once in the meal chest, where I was nearly smothered.”

“Hid you from what?” Fan asked, and he replied, with a gleam in his blue eyes, “From the rebels, of course, don’t you know I’m a Yank?”

“Yes; go on and tell us of Charlie,” Fan said, a little sharply, and he went on very slowly and stopping sometimes with closed eyes, as if he were asleep.

“I was in the battle,—Fredericksburg, you know. It was awful. ’Twas the first I had really been in, and I was so scar’t, and wanted to run away, but couldn’t; when I got over it I guess I was crazy with the roar and shouts and yells from horses and dying men. Did you ever hear a thousand men scream in mortal pain?”

Fan shook her head and he continued: “It’s awful, but the horses are the worst; I hear them now. I shall always hear them till I die.”

He stopped and there came a look upon his face which we feared was death. But Fan bathed his forehead with eau-de-cologne and moistened his lips with water until he revived, and said, “Where did I leave off. Oh, yes, I know; till I die. I got over being scar’t and fought like a bloodhound and wanted to kill them all. I am sorry now and hope I didn’t kill any one. Do you think I did?”

Fan did not answer, and he continued: “When it was over, I got separated from our army somehow and wandered in the woods and cried, my hand ached so, and I was so cold and hungry. Then I heard somebody crying harder than I, or groaning like, and I hunted till I found him under a tree, all bloody and white. I knew he was a boy in grey, but I didn’t care, nor he either; we was boys together, and I knelt down by him and told him I was sorry and asked what I could do.”

“‘Write to Fan-an-Ann,’ he said, and I wrote it on a stone, and my hand hurt me so; we said some prayers together, Our Father, and Now I lay me, and some more that we made up about forgiving us and going to Heaven; and he’s all right and was awfully sorry about the war, and so am I, and when he got took in his head he talked of Easter and the lilies which you have then, and said he could smell them, and he said a good deal about Fan-an-Ann. And then I took his head in my lap and kissed him and he kissed me for his father and for Fan-an-Ann, and he said I was to tell her he was not afraid, for he was going to his mother, and then he died—Oh, yes, he said something about little Katy and kissing her. Don’t cry, it makes me feel so bad,” and opening his great blue eyes he looked at Fan, down whose face the tears were running like rain, and who, stooping down, pressed her lips to those of the boy who had kissed our dying brother.

“Go on,” she said softly, and he went on: “I changed clothes as he told me and prayed that his folks might find him and bring him to you and that I might get here, too, and not be taken prisoner, and I have, but the way was so long and hard and I am so tired and sick and sorry. You won’t let them get me, sure?”

“Never!” and Fan made me think of some wild animal guarding its young, as she drew the sheet over the boy, whose mind began to wander and from whom we could extract but little more and that little was very unsatisfactory.

It was Fan who talked most with him and who asked him his name.

“My real one, or the one I had with the boys?” he said, and she replied, “your real one, so I can write to your mother.”

There was a look of cunning in his bright eyes, as he replied, “I hain’t no mother, except Aunt Martha, and she won’t care, and I don’t want her to know. I ran away from her and enlisted after a while. I was Joe with the boys, but that ain’t the name they gave me in baptism. Do you know the Apostles?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I am one of them. Now guess,” he said, and beginning with Matthew and ending with Paul Fan went over the entire list, but the expression of the boy’s face never changed in the least; nor did he give any sign when she spoke his name, if she did speak it.

“Joe will do,” he said. “Aunt Martha has washed her hands of me a good many times. She was always washing them. She don’t mind whether I am Joe or an Apostle.”

“But where is your home? Where does Aunt Martha live?” Fan asked, and he replied, “She don’t live there now.”

Evidently he did not care to talk of his home, which could not have been a very happy one, judging from what he did say. He called me Ann-an-Fan, while Fan was Fan-an-Ann, and his eyes brightened when she came near him, and he smiled upon her in a way which always brought the tears.

“You are just as good as northern folks,” he said to her once, “and I am sorry I came down to lick you; I wish I had something to give you. Where are my trousers?” Phyllis had washed and ironed the ragged greys and put back in the pocket everything she found there—a jews-harp, a ball of twine, some nails, and a pearl handled knife with three blades, two of which were broken; this with the jews-harp he gave to Fan to remember him by, he said.

“Carlyle gave me the knife one Christmas, and I gave him a lead pencil. I couldn’t get anything more, for I hadn’t any money. I’d been bad; I was always bad, and Aunt Martha wouldn’t give me any,” he said, and when Fan asked him who Carlyle was, he answered, “Oh, a boy I used to know and like. If you see him tell him so, and that I have never told that he took the cake, and wouldn’t if I lived to be a hundred. Aunt Martha whaled me for it, and my, didn’t she put it on; I was too big to be thrashed, and I ran away not long after that, and went to a grocery and then to the war, and she thinks now that I stole the cake!”

This was all we could possibly get from him, and we did not know how much reliance to put upon it, he was delirious so much of the time.

At first father thought to amputate his hand but finally gave that up. It was useless to torture him, he said, as he could not last long, and he did not. It was Monday evening when he came to us and he lingered for three days, sometimes sleeping quietly and sometimes raving about the war and Charlie and the long weary road he had traveled to reach us and Fan-an-Ann and Ann-an-Fan, clinging most to Fan, who watched him day and night as tenderly as if it had been Charlie instead of one of the race she had affected to hate. Once he seemed to be at his old home, and in fear of punishment, for he begged piteously of Aunt Martha to spare him from something, we could not tell what, and he asked us twice not to let her find him, saying he would not go back to her. Again he spoke of a little out of the way town in Maine which Fan wrote down for future reference. Everything about him was wrapped in mystery except the fact that he was there with us, the boy who had cared for our dying brother and for whom we cared to the last. When the morning of Good Friday dawned he sank into a stupor from which we thought he would never awaken, but when the church bell rang for service he started up and opening his eyes said to Fan, “What’s that? Is it Sunday and must I go to Sunday School? I hain’t my lesson.”

“It is Good Friday,” Fan replied, and he continued: “Oh, yes; Good Friday, and Easter; I know. We had ’em down in Maine, and the lilies, too, that he told me about in the woods, and I once spoke a piece. Do you want to hear it?”

Fan nodded, and raising himself in bed, he began:

Softly now the Easter sunlight

Falls on Judea’s wooded hills,

Shining redly through the tree tops,

Lighting up the running rills.

While all things in earth and heaven

Sing aloud with one acclaim

Glory in the highest, Glory,

Glory be to Jesus’ name.

“There was a lot more, but I can’t remember how it goes. Carlyle spoke a piece, too, and did first rate for a little shaver. I taught it to him, but ’twas hard work, as he’d rather play with Don,—that’s the dog. Tell him good-bye, and good-bye Fan-an-Ann, and Ann-an-Fan. Queer that there’s two of you. I don’t believe he knew, but I’ll tell him, and that they were good to me and didn’t let ’em catch me. Now say ‘Our Father,’ for I am getting sleepy, and it is growing dark.”

It was Fan who said it; I could not speak, for I saw the death pallor gather on the face of the boy, who repeated with Fan the familiar words.

“That makes it about square with me and Jesus, and I guess that he won’t turn off a poor boy like me,” he said, and then for a time he was back again at Fredericksburg, fighting like a little bear; then with Charlie in the woods singing a low lullaby such as mothers sing to their restless infants; then in the meal chest and under the bed and in the pounding barrel, shivering with fear, and at last with Fan-an-Ann, who he said was a brick. Then he seemed to listen intently, and whispered, “Hark. Don’t you hear the guns? how they bang away; and how red the river runs; and how fast the men go down! Oh, God, have pity on us all.”

For a moment he lay quiet; then, rousing again, called out triumphantly, “The war is over; the victory is won; Hurrah for——.” He meant to say “The boys in blue.” He had said it often in his delirium, but something in Fan’s eyes checked him, and after looking steadily at her an instant he raised his right arm in the air and called out in a clear, shrill voice, “Hurrah for Fan-an-Ann; three cheers and a tiger, too!” then the hand dropped upon his breast and The Boy was dead.

The neighbors for miles around had heard of him and many had come to us bringing delicacies and flowers and offering assistance, if it were needed. The aid Fan declined, but took the flowers and fruit to the boy, telling him who sent them.

“They are very kind,” he said. “I guess I’m some reconstructed, though I am a Yank yet and stick to the flag. Yes, sir!”

Neither Fan nor I could repress a smile at the energy with which he asserted his loyalty to his cause, and neither liked him the less for it. Fan, too, must have been “some reconstructed,” for she cared for him to the last as tenderly as if he had been her brother, and when he was dead, she with Phyllis made him ready for the grave, crying over him as she had not cried when Charlie died. Then her tears would not come, but now they fell in torrents as she brushed his wavy hair, which had grown rather long and lay in soft rings about his forehead, giving him the look of a young girl, rather than a boy, whose age we could not guess. We cut off two or three of his curls and put them, with the letter he had written for Charlie, into the pocket of the blue uniform which, with the grey, we left hanging on the wall in Charlie’s room.

We buried him on Easter day, and he had the largest funeral ever seen in the neighborhood, for everybody came, and his coffin, over which we hung the Federal flag, was heaped with lilies, which were afterwards dropped into his grave. Then we tried to find his friends, but with only Aunt Martha and Carlyle and the little town in Maine to guide us, it proved a fruitless task.

Fan wrote to the postmaster of the town in Maine, giving all the particulars, and after two months or more she received an answer from the postmaster’s wife, who said that during the first year of the war a company had gone from an adjoining town and in it was a boy, who gave his name as Joseph Wilde. He was a comparative stranger in town and had been for a short time in the employ of a grocer, who spoke very highly of him. But where he came from no one knew, or if he had any friends. And that was all we could learn of “The Boy,” whom we buried on the hillside beside our brother. At the head of his grave is a plain marble slab, and on it “The Boy, who died Good Friday, 1863.” This was Fan’s idea, and every Decoration Day after the war was over she used to hang the Stars and Bars over Charlie’s grave and the Stars and Stripes over the grave of The Boy, who has slept there now for many a year and will sleep there until from the North and the South, the East and the West, the boys in blue and the boys in grey will come together, a vast army, and what was crooked to them here will be made plain and we, who now see through a glass darkly, will then see face to face in the light of the Resurrection morning.

Chapter III.
AFTER THE WAR.

We had done our best to win and had failed. We were conquered, but in Lovering at least we accepted the situation and rejoiced for the peace and quiet which came to us with the disappearance of the soldiers from our soil. Even Fan was glad to go to bed feeling sure that her sleep would not be disturbed by the tramp of horses’ feet or the clamor of hungry men for food and shelter. Our little town had been visited so often by both armies and levied on so frequently for means to carry on the war that its people were greatly impoverished. Whether it were that our house was larger and our accommodations generally more ample, or that our father’s manner of receiving an unwelcome visitor was different from our neighbors, we seemed to have suffered most. Our horses and cows and sheep were gone. Our negroes were gone with the exception of Phyllis, who, after her first attempt to leave, stood firmly by us, refusing wages after she knew she was free.

Only poor white truck work for pay, and she wasn’t one of them, she said.

Our timber was damaged for the soldiers had cut down the trees in our woods for their camp fires, and worst of all our father’s patients were mostly gone. Belonging to the old school, in which he believed as he did in his religion, he adhered strictly to his morphine and calomel, and when a young physician from Richmond opened an office in town, with little bottles and little pills, and prices to correspond, the people flocked to him, and father was left with only a few patients and a long list of uncollectible bills against some of the deserters. Both Fan and I inclined to homeopathy and urged him to adopt it to some extent, but he shook his head. He had sat on the fence during the war, he said, and received only kicks from either side, and now he should stick to his principles and allopathy if he starved. We did not starve, but we were at times in great straits. Fan and I made over our old dresses for ourselves and little Katy, and we brushed and mended father’s clothes, which, in spite of our care grew more and more threadbare and shabby until his dress coat was the only garment which was not shiny and had not more or less darns in it. This he always wore to dinner, partly from habit, partly to please us, and more I think to please old Phyllis, who felt that the glory of the family had not quite departed so long as the swallow tail appeared at dinner, even if it were laid aside the moment the meal was over. There was no denying the fact that grim poverty was staring us in the face, and no one felt it more keenly than Phyllis, who, although she would take nothing from us, offered to hire out for wages which she would give to us. This we would not allow, and we struggled on through the summer, raising and selling what we could from our land, which we all worked together, and living on as little as it was possible for five people to live upon. Fan suffered the most, she was so proud and so luxurious in her tastes and so averse to any thing like economy.

“I’d do anything for money,” she said one day to Jack Fullerton, who was helping us pick our grapes, which he was to sell for us in Petersburg.

Jack had won his shoulder-straps and was a lieutenant when the war closed, but he dropped the title with his uniform and was only Jack to us,—a handsome, honest-hearted young man, whom everybody liked, whom I adored in secret, and whom Fan worried and teased and flirted with outrageously. She knew he loved her, and I believed she loved him in return. But she encouraged him one day and repelled him the next, saying often in his presence that she should never marry unless the man had money and it would be useless for one without it to offer himself to her.

“Then I’d better not do it,” Jack would say, jokingly, with the most intense love burning in his eyes and sounding in his voice.

“No, you’d better not, if you don’t want me to refuse to speak to you again,” she would answer, with a laugh and a look which only made him more in love than ever.

He knew she cared for him, and that it was only the barrier of poverty which stood between them. And so they joked and quarreled and made up, and he was with us every day, helping in the garden and yard and at last with the grapes, of which we had quantities that year. Father was in Boston, where he had gone on some business which he hoped might result in a little profit. While there he had, through the influence of a friend, been called to see a Mrs. Haverleigh, who was very ill. As her family physician was in Europe she had asked him to attend her until she was better. To this he had consented and had been gone from home three or four weeks. Knowing that our grapes must be picked Jack had offered his services and on a lovely September morning we were all out by the vines filling the baskets with great purple clusters of fruit which Jack sometimes cut for us and sometimes Fan, who was in wild spirits. She had taken her turn at cutting and was sitting half way up the step-ladder, looking very lovely and picturesque against the green background, in her old black skirt and scarlet jacket, with the bright color in her face and her hair blowing around her forehead. A handsome carriage drawn by a span of fine horses had gone by. Its occupants,—a gentleman and lady,—seemed to be scanning our house curiously. We could see the lady distinctly and felt sure she was from some city, Richmond presumably, and Fan was speculating about her and wishing she could ride in her carriage, when I heard a step on the grass, and a tall distinguished-looking man came towards us. In his citizen’s dress I did not at once recognize him; but Fan did, and, without coming from her perch, exclaimed, “Col. Errington!”

Then I knew the handsome officer, who had once been our guest and who now greeted us with the smile I remembered so well, because it had in it something so cold and patronizing.

“Good afternoon, Colonel,” Fan said to him. “You have come back to see your conquered enemies, I suppose. We heard of your promotion and of the bullet wound some of our boys gave you at Petersburg. Was it in your back?”

She was very saucy, and for an instant a hot color flamed into the Colonel’s face, and there came into his grey eyes a red look such as I had seen once or twice when he was quartered upon us and his men displeased him. But it quickly faded under the spell of Fan’s beauty, and the light which flashed from her eyes and belied her words.

Laughing good-humoredly, the colonel replied, “Rebellious as ever, I see; I hoped I might find you reconstructed.”

“Not a bit of it,” Fan said, stepping down from the ladder and running her fingers through her hair, by which means she left a long mark of grape juice on her forehead. “We are just as big rebels as ever. You beat us because you had more men and money, and we were obliged to give up. It was like a big dog fighting a little dog, which has just as much courage and more, too, than the big one, but is finally worn out by strength rather than by skill. Do you see the point?”

“Yes, I see,” he said, “and in Constantinople I have also seen the big dog, after the fight was over, take the little one in its paws and toss it up and fondle it as if there had been no bone of contention. I hope it may be so in this case.”

There was no mistaking the admiration with which the Colonel regarded Fan. Jack saw it and drew a step nearer to her, while she answered hotly, “Never! We are not Turks, and only a dog would suffer itself to be fondled by the hand which had whipped it.” Then she added with a laugh: “Don’t let us quarrel over spilled milk, but let me present to you my friend, Lieut. Fullerton, Col. Errington.”

During the skirmish between the Colonel and Fan, I had mentally contrasted the two men, Jack and the Colonel, between whose ages there was a difference of several years. Both were tall and erect, with a bearing which comes only from military discipline. By the majority of people the Colonel would have been called the finer looking, as he was the more distingué, with his polish and air of fashion and city breeding. But to me he bore no comparison to Jack Fullerton, with his honest face and kindly smile and eyes which met yours fearlessly. His clothes were shabby and country made, it is true; his shoes were worn and grey, and his hands were not as soft and white as those which the Colonel had a trick of rubbing together as he talked, and on one of which a small diamond was shining. But they were helpful hands, ready always for service both to friend or foe, and in his heart no passions had ever stirred like those which at times showed themselves on Col. Errington’s face.

After the introduction the two men, who had fought against each other in more than one battle, shook hands as cordially as if they had been old friends and for a few moments chatted together pleasantly. Then, turning to Fan, the Colonel explained that he had come to Petersburg on business and that his sister Cornelia, who kept his house in Washington, had accompanied him. Remembering his visit to our neighborhood a little more than a year ago, and desirous to see the place again, he had suggested to his sister that they drive out from Petersburg.

“We started early,” he said, “and have enjoyed ourselves immensely. Cornie is delighted with your Virginia scenery. She is at the Golden Horn, and if agreeable to you I will bring her to call.”

Both Fan and I gasped at the thought of so great a lady, as we felt sure Miss Cornelia Errington must be, coming to call upon us. But we soon rallied and said we should be pleased to see her, and then to my amazement Fan added: “We would invite you to lunch if we were going to have anything but potatoes, green corn, hoe-cake and grapes. We don’t have very elaborate meals since you Yankees spoiled us.”

The Colonel took no notice of the last remark, but said: “Grapes, hoe-cake, green corn and baked potatoes, the four things I like best in all the culinary department, and so does Cornie; we’ll come. To say the truth I did not much like the looks of the Golden Horn. What time do you lunch?”

Fan told him, and then extended an invitation to Jack to lunch with us. But he declined, and I could see a shadow on his face as he walked away from the house, followed soon by the Colonel, who was going for his sister.

“Fanny Hathern!” I exclaimed, when we were alone, “are you crazy to ask those people here when you know we’ve nothing fit to offer them.”

“What is good enough for us is good enough for them,” Fan answered, proudly, starting for the kitchen and a conference with Phyllis, while I began to put our rooms in order for the expected visitors.

Cornelia Errington, whom her brother called Cornie, was a very handsome woman of twenty-eight or thirty, but seemingly as cold as a block of marble, except when she smiled. Then the whole expression of her face changed as completely as if she had been another person. She was born in New York, but had lived many years in Washington, where she superintended her brother’s house. She was highly accomplished, had traveled extensively, knew the best people everywhere, and was in every sense a lady. She met us very graciously, and affected to be delighted with our rambling old Virginia house; which she said was her ideal of a planter’s home, with its great airy rooms, wide hall and broad piazzas.

“But my papa ain’t a planter, he’s a doctor and a gentleman,” Katy said.

She had been greatly impressed with the lady’s manner and dress and diamond rings, and evidently wished to impress her in turn with her father’s greatness. Drawing Katy to her and stroking her golden hair Miss Errington replied, “I am sure he is a gentleman, whether he is a doctor or a farmer, and you are a dear little creature. Was it you I heard singing in the yard before lunch?”

Katy was always singing and so accustomed were we to it that we seldom paid much attention, except sometimes to wonder if it were she or the canary bird in its cage trilling so loud and clear. Now, however, we remembered to have heard her imitating a mocking bird just before Phyllis, with her red turban built up five or six inches higher than usual, announced with a low courtesy that lunch was served. There was in the room our old piano brought from Charleston by our mother and seldom used for neither Fan nor I were very musical. Going up to it Miss Errington ran her fingers up and down the keys in a way which showed that she was mistress of the instrument.

“Shocking!” she said, involuntarily, then apologetically to Fan, “I beg your pardon, but with such a voice in embryo as that I heard outside you ought to have a better piano;” then to Katy, “Sing to me, child, something, I don’t care what.”

Nothing could suit Katy better. She had often sang alone in school and Sunday school, and striking her stage attitude, as Fan called it she sang as I had never heard her sing before, soaring up and up until she touched high C without the slightest effort or break in her voice.

“You will be a second Patti, you sing just as I have heard she sang when a child,” Miss Errington said when Katy finished. Then, turning to us, she continued: “Do you know there is a fortune in that voice. She must have instruction; the best, too, there is to be had, and one day you will be proud when she stands before thousands and holds them spellbound as she has me, even with her simple songs.”

Miss Errington was evidently an enthusiast in music, but Fan cut her short by saying scornfully, “Do you think a daughter of Dr. Hathern would ever go on the stage? Never! We have not fallen so low as that, poor as we are. I’d rather see her dead.”

She was greatly excited, and Miss Errington looked at her wonderingly, while Katy pulled Fan’s dress and whispered, “What is it? What did I do? Didn’t I sing well?”

“Yes, too well; never sing again,” Fan answered fiercely, and Katy replied, half crying, “But I must; I can’t help it; it will come; it would choke me if I didn’t.”

“Choke, then,” Fan said, while the Colonel, who had listened with an expression, half cynical and half amused, on his face, now spoke and said, “Quite a tempest in a teapot over nothing; Cornie is music mad, and the child certainly has a wonderful voice for one so young.”

Just then a robin flew down upon a sprig of honeysuckle near the window and began to trill its evening song; quick as thought Katy darted through the door, and unmindful of Fan’s injunction never to sing again, began to imitate the bird, which stopped a moment and poising itself first on one foot and then upon the other looked around for the fellow-songster it seemed to think was near it.

“I never heard anything like it,” Miss Errington said. “That talent must be cultivated, but she must not strain her voice while growing. I see no reason why she should not have as much a night as Patti, or if you object so to the stage, there are the churches where she could command a large salary.”

As she spoke her eyes wandered about the room and I felt sure they were taking an inventory of our faded carpet and worn, old-fashioned furniture. She seemed to me more and more like a woman accustomed to dictate and to have her own way, and I could not rid myself of a feeling that having once seen Katy she would not readily forget her. The songs outside had ceased by this time; the robin had flown away, and the child had disappeared. Col. Errington had Fan all to himself at one end of the piazza to which we had repaired, and I was listening to a dissertation from Miss Errington on the best method for removing stains and spots from old carpets and dresses and feeling sure she had seen them in ours and was taking this way to instruct me. We had heard the whistle of the mail train from the east, and twenty minutes later Black Beauty went galloping down the lane at one side of the house with Katy on his back, bareheaded, with her fair hair blowing in the wind and her face turned smilingly towards us as she passed. We were expecting a letter from father and she was going to the Postoffice, as she often did on Black Beauty, saddleless and sometimes bridleless, for she was a fearless little rider and Black Beauty the most gentle of beasts.

“See, Cornie, that is the pony I told you about, the one some of my rascally soldiers stole,” the Colonel said to his sister, who looked admiringly after the horse and rider, saying, “Upon my word, she sits the creature well, and without a saddle, too. She has more than one accomplishment.”

“You will be advising us next to train her for a circus,” Fan said sarcastically, but Miss Errington did not reply, and went on giving me good advice until Katy came cantering back, holding a letter in her hand and reining Beauty up to the side of the piazza.

Springing from his back and handing the letter to me she stood holding the pony by the mane, while Miss Errington bent forward and began to examine him with the eye of a connoisseur.

“Really,” she said to her brother, “he is a beauty and no mistake; I should like him for my own when we go to our place in the country. Is he yours?” and she looked at me.

I shook my head, and nodded towards Fan, to whom she said, “What will you take for him?”

“He is not for sale,” Fan answered, decidedly, stepping down by the horse and winding her arm around his neck.

The brother and sister, so much alike in looks, were also so far alike in disposition that opposition only increased their determination to succeed. In this instance Miss Errington was the more earnest of the two and seemed resolved to carry her point and have Black Beauty whether we were willing or not, and her brother seconded her wishes. Two hundred dollars cash down in crisp greenbacks were finally offered, and I shall never forget the look on Fan’s face as she put it down on Beauty’s neck, thinking intently, as I well knew, of the many things we needed and which two hundred dollars would buy. Of our worn furniture generally, our house, from which the paint was gone, our shutters, unhinged and loose, and more than all father’s darned and threadbare coats and shocking hat, and our own dresses, made over so many times. Two hundred dollars seemed a fortune, and Beauty was only a luxury. Father had his saddle horse for visiting the few patients who lived beyond walking distance, and Black Beauty was really more ornamental than useful to us. This was the train of thought passing through her mind, while I watched her curiously. Lifting her head at last she said proudly, with great tears standing on her long lashes, “Next to father, Ann and Katy, I love Black Beauty better than any living thing. You can see that we are poor enough, made so by the war,” here her voice began to break, but she steadied it and went on: “We need many things, but until poverty has a firmer foothold in our house than it has now I cannot let Black Beauty go. If a time comes when I must part with him I will let you know; I’d rather you had him than any one, for I believe you would be kind to him.”

Taking her arm from the horse’s neck she gave a peculiar whistle, saying, “Go, Beauty, go.”

He understood her and went prancing down the rear lane towards his pasture; sometimes with his heels in the air and sometimes his forefeet, as if giving vent to his delight at having escaped some threatened danger. I had thought Miss Errington cold and emotionless and was surprised at the sudden transformation in her manner after this as she talked to Fan, who was soon herself again, chatting gaily and repeating ludicrous and exaggerated stories of the Colonel when he was our unbidden guest and our place full of blue coats.

It was now five o’clock and Phyllis brought in the tea service for our five o’clock tea, a custom Fan, who was extravagantly fond of tea, had introduced in imitation of an English family recently come to town and with whom we were on terms of intimacy. In our low financial state this seemed to me a useless expenditure, but when I remonstrated Phyllis silenced me by saying, “Lors, honey, what’s a pinch of tea and dust of sugar, and don’t I bile de groun’s over in de mornin’ for my breakfast. Let Miss Fanny ’lone. All de quality in England does it, dat big red coat at Mass’r Harwood’s say, an’ ain’t we quality, if we is poor.”

So we had our five o’clock tea, in which Jack often joined us, while other young people sometimes dropped in so that the occasion was usually a very enjoyable one. This afternoon it was especially so. With the appearance of the china and silver teapot Fan’s spirits increased. She liked to be “quality” quite as well as Phyllis, and did the honors gracefully, serving Miss Errington from a red Dresden cup which had been one of our mother’s wedding presents, and giving the colonel a royal Worcester, which belonged to Katy’s mother. Whether it was the pleasure of being waited upon by Fan, or whether he was really so fond of tea, the Colonel took so many cups that several “pinches” were added to the pot, and the next morning I saw a bowl full of grounds on Phyllis’s kitchen table, but knew by the fresh, pungent odor of old Hyson which permeated the room that she was indulging in something more than a “bilin’ over.” After our tea-drinking the carriage came for our guests who expressed themselves as delighted with their call.

“Come to Washington and I will show you all the sights,” Miss Errington said to us both; then to me, “Take care of Katy’s voice.”

Just what the Colonel said to Fan I did not hear. He was talking very low and looking at her with his cold, steely eyes, which kindled as he looked and brought a hot flush to her face.

“No, no. I don’t think I will,” I heard her say, and that was all.

After he was gone she stood watching the carriage until it was out of sight; then said to me, “That man had the effrontery to ask me to write to him, and he squeezed my hand so hard that it aches now; the old idiot! I am going to wash it.”

Bouncing out of the room she ran into the arms of Jack Fullerton, who came to say that all the grape baskets at the vines were full and to ask if there were more to be filled. I am afraid we were rather a shiftless lot; at least we were told so often enough in the future—coming on apace. We were certainly thoughtless, and while visiting and tea-drinking entirely forgot that the baskets must be ready that night if they went on the early morning train to Richmond. But Jack had not forgotten, and while I talked to Miss Errington and Fan flirted with the Colonel, he worked steadily on, occasionally crushing a cluster of the ripe fruit so hard that the juice spurted over his coat as he caught the sound of Fan’s rippling laughter and the deep tones of the man whom he began to dread as his rival. But Fan more than made amends now.

Seizing his arm with both hands and rubbing her cheek against it, she exclaimed, “You dear old Jack, how good you are to us, doing our work, while we entertain those people for whom we don’t care a pin; and don’t you think, he asked me to correspond with him!”

“He did?” Jack said, indignantly, and Fan replied, “Yes, he did, and he’s forty, if he’s a day.”

She knew he wasn’t forty, but she was trying to appease Jack, whose brown eyes shone with delight as he looked at her, and who, when he thought I did not see him, tried to raise her hand to his lips. But she wrenched it away, and stood back from him, saying laughingly, “No, you don’t. No man has ever kissed me except father and Charlie and the boy, and never will until——”

She didn’t say when, but Jack did not seem at all disturbed, and that night long after I was in bed he sat upon the piazza with her, and I heard the low murmur of their voices and felt again the old pain in my heart, and knew that I would give years of my life for the love for which Fan cared so little.

Chapter IV.—Annie’s Story Continued.
A SHADOW BEGINS TO FALL.

The letter which Katy brought us from the office was from father, who was still in Boston and attending Mrs. Haverleigh. She was better, he wrote, but unwilling he should leave her until all danger of a relapse was past, consequently we need not expect him until the end of a week when he hoped to bring us a big fee, as his patient was said to be very wealthy. He did not mention Mr. Haverleigh, but of course there was such an appendage to Mrs. Haverleigh and he would pay the bill. Then we began to speculate as to the probable amount and what we should buy with it. Fan decided upon new boots and gloves; Katy was to have a doll; while I hoped she might also have music lessons, for aside from her wonderful voice she had a great fondness for the piano and had already picked out a few simple tunes which she played with a good deal of expression. Jack, who was always included in our family councils, as if he were our brother, laughingly told us not to count our chickens until they were hatched, and the sequel proved the wisdom of his advice.

At the end of the week father came home, looking fresher and younger and more erect than when he went away. The trip had done him a great deal of good. He had met several old friends and made some new ones. When we inquired for Mrs. Haverleigh he did not seem inclined to talk much of her, but in answer to Fan’s direct question he told us the amount of his fee. He had made her so many professional visits and received the usual city price for each visit; fifty dollars in all. It was not a large sum, and it went mostly to pay the little household bills which in spite of our economy accumulated so fast. I gave up the music lessons for Katy, while Fan called Mr. Haverleigh a stingy old man, as she blacked her shabby boots and mended her worn gloves.

Sometime in November Jack went into an insurance office in Richmond, and life at the Elms moved in so monotonous a groove that Fan, who craved excitement, sometimes wished the war back upon us to keep us from stagnating. There were one or two letters from Miss Errington, addressed to me and full of Katy’s future.

Several times the Colonel sent Fan papers and magazines and once he wrote her a letter which she promptly tore up, and then cried for half a day. Every week father had a letter from Boston which he answered within a few days. Once in passing the hall stand where he had laid a letter while he went to his room for his gloves, I glanced hastily at it and read, as I supposed, “Mr. Thomas Haverleigh, No. — Beacon St., Boston, Mass.” Fan would have taken it up and made sure of the direction, but I only gave it a look and wondered why he was writing to Mr. Haverleigh. He was a good deal changed these days and he seemed silent and abstracted and I often saw him looking at us in a wistful way as if there was something on his mind which he hated to tell us.

“It’s money matters and the miserable bills we owe everywhere that trouble him,” Fan said, when I spoke of it to her.

“Oh, if I were rich, and could help him; and I can. There is a way.”

“What way?” I asked, and she replied, “I can sell Black Beauty, or—myself, which is better. Isn’t it sometimes a duty to sacrifice one’s self for others? I didn’t tell you that Col. Errington proposed to me in that letter I burned up! Well, he did, in an assured kind of way, as if he thought I would be overwhelmed with the honor and say yes at once; then, as if a doubt crept into his mind, he told me to weigh the matter carefully before answering, for if a favor were once refused him he never asked for it a second time. I am weighing the matter carefully. I have not answered his letter. I keep hoping something will turn up. If it don’t I shall marry the Colonel.”

“And what of Jack?” I asked.

At the mention of his name Fan flushed a little, then replied, “I like Jack and always shall, but what can he do, hampered with an invalid mother and only an insurance clerk’s salary. I was never intended for a poor man’s wife and would rather live at home in poverty with you than in Jack’s home with his mother and old black Patsey, who was always running away during the war and only came back after it was over because she couldn’t do better.”

There was no use arguing with Fan when in this mood, and the subject was not mentioned again for months. I knew she did not write to Col. Errington, and she did write occasionally to Jack during the winter, which passed rather slowly, for Lovering was never very gay at its best, and the war had left too many aching hearts for us to be very hilarious. Father, however, seemed in unusually good spirits and I occasionally heard him whistling or humming softly to himself when he was alone. When March came round he surprised us one morning saying he was going to Boston again on some important business which he hoped would result favorably for us all. He did not tell us what the business was, but when Fan asked if it had anything to do with Mr. Haverleigh, he answered, “Not directly; no,” and we said good-bye to him with no suspicion of the truth. He had bought himself a new suit of clothes, which he greatly needed, and we were very proud of him when he put them on. We told him he looked quite the Virginia gentleman again, and Fan came near boxing Phyllis’s ears when she heard her muttering something about “ole mas’r savin’ his money to pay his debts instead of scurripen’ roun’ de country an’ makin’ a fool of hisself.”

“As if our father could make a fool of himself! What does Phyllis mean?”

“I believe he has been speculating,” Fan said to me, “I feel sure something good is going to turn up, if we wait long enough.”

Chapter V.—The Author’s Story.
SOMETHING DOES TURN UP.

Dr. Hathern had been gone two weeks and in that time had written but one letter to his daughters. This was addressed to Fanny and in it he said that the business which had taken him to Boston was progressing favorably and he should soon feel at liberty to tell what it was and return home a happier and more prosperous man than when he left it. Meanwhile his daughters were to enjoy themselves and get whatever was needed for their comfort. Then he added as if it were an afterthought:

“By the way, I think it would be well for Phyllis to give the whole house a regular overhauling,—housecleaning they call it at the north, and I remember when I was a boy that every thorough housekeeper did this twice a year,—taking up and beating carpets, washing curtains and blankets and paint and floors and putting the furniture out to air. I have no doubt southern housekeepers do the same, and it seems to me there were some such upheavals which made me very uncomfortable when your mother was living; but nothing of the sort has occurred since. You were too young when your own mother and Katy’s died to know about such things, and Phyllis, who has been in charge so long, has not thought of it. Negroes are apt to be slack.

“Consult Mrs. Fullerton, if you don’t know what to do, and if extra help is needed for Phyllis, get it, of course. Tell her to take especial pains with my room. I think I have detected a faint musty smell in it when the air was damp. This can be remedied by beating the carpet thoroughly and letting in a great deal of sunshine. I may have kept it shut up too much. You will hear from me again in about two weeks and then I shall tell you when to expect me.

“Your loving father,

“Samuel Hathern.”

This letter Fanny read aloud to Annie, with running comments upon it as she read.

“Is father growing crazy, or what has got into him to write in such a strain. Must, indeed, in his room! It’s his old boots and shoes and saddlebags of medicines which he keeps in his closet. House cleaning twice a year, with everything turned out of the windows! Thinks we have never had one since mother died! Haven’t we?”

Annie didn’t think they had, and the most she could recall during her mother’s lifetime was a faint remembrance of bare floors and dirt and straw and litter, and soap and suds and discomfort generally, with a scurrying here and there of negroes with Phyllis at the helm; then a great quiet, with the fireplaces full of green boughs and peonies and snowballs and herself and Fanny told not to put their little soiled fingers on the window panes because they had just been washed. This was very far back, and neither Annie nor Fanny could remember any housecleaning since so extreme as that. Certainly there had been none since Katy’s mother died, and Phyllis had managed the household. In short, as they confessed to each other, they were rather easy-going young ladies, who, accustomed to many servants before the war, had fallen into the habit of leaving everything to Phyllis. And that functionary was very willing to have it left to her, and waited upon them and petted them and scolded them alternately with all the freedom of an old and trusty family servant.

In the days of slavery there had been no more valuable negro in Lovering than herself, and she knew it, and prided herself upon it and the respectability of her ancestors generally as proven by the fact that there was not a drop of white blood in her veins.

“I’d be ashamed if there was, and blush for my mother. Black is a good color, which wears well, and I thank de Lord I am as black as a Guiney nigger,” she said; but she was equally proud of the fair faces of the twins and little Katy, whom she loved as if they were her own.

She had nursed them when they were babies; had walked the floor with them many a night when they were teething or had the colic; had drawn them miles and miles from cabin to cabin in a baby cart—proud of her twins and proud of herself as “Mas’r Hathern’s nigger, who was worth more’n a thousand dollars, and who he wouldn’t sell for nothin’;” she had closed the eyes of both her mistresses, and prepared them for the grave. She had comforted the two little motherless girls with cake and honey and a most wonderful rag doll, and taken the new-born baby, Katy, to her bosom and bed. She had tried to run away with a part of the Federal army, but found that she could not, so great was her love for her master and his family. She was a part of them, or rather they were a part of her, and after she assumed the entire management of the household she owned them just as they once owned her, and sometimes ruled them more rigorously than she had ever been ruled.

In this condition of things it was natural that the young ladies should settle down into a state of listless dependence, allowing her to do what she pleased and when she pleased, and giving but little thought to what was done or left undone, provided they were comfortable and the general look of the house was neat and tidy. At long intervals she had her times of “clarin’ up,” when the house was full of brooms and brushes and mops and clouds of dust and the odor of soap suds. On these occasions, in a petticoat patched with many colors, which stopped half way between her knees and her feet and a knit jacket left by one of the soldiers, Phyllis would march from room to room, rating the young ladies soundly for the disorderly condition in which she found them, and wondering what their poor mother would say if she knew how they slatted their things and left them for her to pick up, when every bone in her old body ached. But if they tried to help her she spurned their offers disdainfully. She reckoned she knew what “de quality ought to do, an’ it wan’t for her young misseses to sile dar white hands, when dar was a big pair of black ones, made to soil and spin. What did cussed be Canan mean if it wan’t that the blacks was to sweat an’ slave and have der bad times in dis world an’ de whites der good, an’ in de nex’ wise wersa.”

Phyllis was great on theology and powerful in a prayer meeting, where she could be heard for nearly a quarter of a mile, when she was moved by the sperrit to let herself out. Naturally her arguments prevailed when she brought forward the Bible to prove their validity, and Annie and Fanny usually succumbed and let her have her way.

Occasionally when she wished to try some fancy dish Fanny made a raid upon the kitchen, greatly to the discomfiture of Phyllis, who fluttered like a hen when its brood of chickens is disturbed, while a close observer might have thought she was fearful of having something discovered which she wished to hide. But Fanny knew better, and after the time she found the nutmeg grater in Phyllis’s pocket and the rolling pin, which had been lost for two or three days, on the floor under the table, she abandoned the kitchen, and the old negress was left monarch of all she surveyed.

Now, however, there must be a general cleaning,—a thorough overhauling,—and Fanny was deputed to notify Phyllis, whom she found eating her dinner on a stool outside her cabin door, her turban somewhat awry and her usually good-humored face clouded over as she shoo-ed the chickens and screamed at the dog, which from an adjoining garden had strayed into her domains.

“A reg’lar overhaulin’, wid de carpets all up and whaled, an’ de furniture turned out of do’ to a’r, an’ his room smellin’ of musk,” she said, when Fanny told what her father had written. “Is Mas’r Hathern ’sinuatin’ that I’m dirty, an’ I sarvin’ him so long an’ faithful? I wouldn’t have ble’ved it,” and her voice trembled and her head shook till her turban was displaced and took an upward turn, as it was wont to do when she was displeased.

It was a saying of the young ladies that they could tell Phyllis’s state of mind from the height of her turban, and when Fan saw it begin to lengthen she knew there was a storm brewing, and braced herself to meet it.

“Who’s to take up dem carpets an’ wallop ’em, and put ’em down again I’d like to know. Last time I clar’d up I done cotched such a misery in my back and laigs that I’ve had rheumatis’ ever since, and I didn’t hist up de carpets nuther.”

Fanny explained that she was to have help, but this only brought out a snort from the old woman, who went on: “Extra help, as if I was an onery nigger like old Patsey. An’ for de Lord’s sake whar’s de money to come from to pay de help? Mas’r can’t pay de bills now, unless he sells me, an’ sometimes I think I’ll ’vise him to do dat an’ get out of debt.”

“But you are free. We can’t sell you, and wouldn’t if we could; that is all in the past,” Fanny suggested.

“Dat’s so; more’s de pity,” Phyllis rejoined, and went on to say that she reckoned she wan’t so old yet that she couldn’t wallop a carpet and put it down, if her knees were not too stiff and she should do it, too; and begin the next day; help indeed, when she was ’round.

By this time the Fullerton chickens were on the strawberry patch again and the Fullerton dog had his nose in the refuse pail, which he finally upset. But in her excitement Phyllis did not notice it. She was too intent upon the housecleaning, which was commenced the next morning with a vengeance, and without the slightest system or order. Every room and closet from cellar to garret was turned upside down, with carpets up and furniture out, and not a spot where one could sit and be comfortable. They ate on the pantry shelf and slept on the floor while the worst of the pandemonium continued. True to her determination Phyllis walloped the carpets herself and did it so effectually that one of them, the oldest and most tender was walloped into tatters and could not be used again. When it came to putting them down Phyllis gave out. Her knees would not bend, and her back and arms were too lame, while not a negro was to be found willing to help. Fortunately in this emergency Jack had an off day, which he spent with Fan-and-Ann, who pressed him into service. Arrayed in one of Phyllis’s clean turbans and aprons, and armed with hammer and nails, he attacked the carpets vigorously and with the help of the young ladies and with a great deal of joking and fun they were put down as few carpets were ever put down before,—crooked and puckered, and loose, while Jack had a blood blister on his thumb and Fanny a bruise on her knuckles, where she struck them with the hammer, and Annie a headache, which lasted two whole days. But they were down and seemed very fresh and clean, as did the entire house when Phyllis was through with it and free to nurse her swollen arms and hands, the result of so much lifting and carpet beating. The odor of must, if there had ever been any, had disappeared from the Doctor’s room, with his old boots and saddlebags. As it was his carpet which had been beaten to tatters, its place had been supplied with some light, pretty matting bought at a reduced rate at a forced sale.

“I wish we could afford a new chamber set, too,” Fan said, looking ruefully at the high post bedstead, with its canopy and valance, and at the bureau and chairs older than she was, as they had come from the south with her mother.

But this was out of the question. The family purse was too low. The chamber set was given up. The post bedstead, with its feather bed, was made high and soft, and the best white counterpane put upon it. There were clean covers upon the bureau and square stand, where the Book of Psalms, which the first Mrs. Hathern had used, was still lying, and with it a prayer-book which had belonged to Katy’s mother. Fan brought a pretty pin cushion from her room, with a slipper case and tidy, and when all was done, called Phyllis to see the effect.

“Mighty fine and invitin’;” Phyllis said, “’pears like you’re expectin’ a bride, te-he-he.”

The laugh had in it a sound of sobbing, rather than of merriment, and Phyllis’s turban was slightly elongated as she went back to her work. All her insinuations, however, were lost upon the daughters, who, with no suspicion of her meaning, sat down to enjoy the quiet and freshness of their home, daily expecting a letter telling when their father was coming to enjoy it with them.

Chapter VI.—Annie’s Story.
THE SHADOWS DEEPEN.

After a ten days’ siege the housecleaning came to an end, with no worse disaster than the entire demolition of one carpet, literally beaten to death,—the breaking of one or two windows, a caster split off from a bureau, and a cupboard with dishes in it knocked flat in our attempts to move it. Phyllis had a “misery” in her back and we were all more or less afflicted with colds we had caught during the upheaval. But we had a heap of fun with Jack, who helped us out, and the house was clean, or we thought it so, and only father’s presence was needed to make us quite happy again. But he did not come and he didn’t write. Every morning we said “we shall hear from him to-day,” and every night a fresh disappointment awaited us, for he neither wrote nor came, and in our anxiety we were beginning to think of telegraphing to his address in Boston and inquiring if any thing had happened to him. It was Fan who suggested this one morning, about a week after the cleaning was over.

“Wait one more day,” I said, “and if we do not hear to-night we’ll telegraph to-morrow.”

It was now past the middle of April, but the day was cold and cloudy, and late in the afternoon the rain began to fall, softly at first like a gentle April shower, but gradually increasing until by the time we heard the train from the east and Fan started for the office it was a regular downpour, which beat against the windows and ran in great streams from a defective eaves-trough over the door. In all lives there are some days which so impress themselves upon our minds that the minutest detail is never forgotten, but comes to us over and over again, with the joy or the sorrow which wrote itself so indelibly upon our memories. Such a day was this, and as I write I hear again the soughing of the wind through a great pine tree which stood in a corner of the yard, and the rain sifting down upon the turf beneath it, and see the blaze from the pine knots which Phyllis had lighted on the hearth, and as the blaze leaps up, filling the room with warmth and light I see at my side Katy’s golden head bent over the picture-book she is reading, while one of her small white hands rests upon my lap. In the kitchen I hear old Phyllis crooning a well-known melody, consisting mostly of inquiries as to the whereabouts of the Hebrew children, as she prepares our evening meal.

During father’s absence we had dispensed with our six o’clock dinner and contented ourselves with lunch and our five o’clock tea, but this night I had ordered a substantial supper, with a vague presentiment that father might surprise us, and I can smell the savory dishes as I smelled them then and feel the same appetizing sensation which they brought to me. As the light and heat from the pine knot increased and the flames went rolling up the chimney in graceful curves, the faces of the dead looked at me from the blaze,—faces of the boy in grey and the boy in blue whose graves were on the hillside. That of the boy in blue was the more distinct, and I saw again the great sunken blue eyes which had turned to us so wistfully as the pale lips pleaded that we would not “let them get him,” or “let her find him.” We knew whom he meant by them, and were reasonably sure that the her was the Aunt Martha, for whom neither Fan nor myself entertained a great amount of respect.

Now, as I watched the fire,—half asleep it may be,—and saw alternately the faces of my brother and the boy, Aunt Martha came also and stood before me on the hearth,—a tall thin woman of the New England type, with firm-set lips and hard, unsympathetic eyes, which never softened a whit when I questioned her of “the boy,” and asked why she had never come to inquire for him before, and who was the Carlyle he had spoken of so kindly. Just as she was about to answer me Katy started up exclaiming, “There she is,” and I awoke to hear the sound of voices outside.—Fan’s voice, and with it another which always made my heart beat faster, although it never spoke to me except as a brother might speak to his sister. Jack had come home that evening and Fan had met him and brought him with her, and they came in laughing and chatting merrily, and shaking the rain drops from their umbrellas and wraps.

“How perfectly delightful that fire is,” Fan said, holding one of her wet boots near it to dry, and bidding Phyllis bring a plate for Jack and hurry on the supper, as she was nearly famished. “I have a letter from father,” she continued, as we drew up to the table, “but it will keep till after tea.”

We were a very merry party, as we always were when Jack was with us, for he had the happy faculty of knowing how to bring out the best of everybody. He had been promoted and his salary increased, and he was in high spirits, as we all were, and not one of us dreamed of what was in store for us, when, as Jack asked me for his third cup of coffee, Fan, who had finished her supper, said, “If you are going to drink coffee all night and don’t mind, I’ll see what father has written.”

She took his letter from her pocket; looked at it very leisurely; opened it carefully with a knife, as if afraid of spoiling the envelope, and then began to read it. I was pouring Jack some hot coffee, which Phyllis had just brought in, and did not look at her until Jack startled me by saying, “Why, Fan, what is the matter?”

Then I turned to her and saw that her face was nearly as white as the letter over which her eyes were traveling with lightning speed.

“Fanny, Fanny,” I exclaimed; “what is it? what has happened? Is father ill, or dead?”

“Neither,” she answered, in a voice very unlike herself. “Neither ill nor dead, as you mean it; but dead to us. He is to be married to-night at eight o’clock.”

For a moment everything turned black around me, and I might have fallen from my chair if Phyllis, who was standing near me, had not put her hand upon me as she said, “Surmised it all ‘long. I done tol’ you so.”

Neither Fan nor I paid any attention to her then; we were too intent upon the letter, which Fan at last read aloud and which ran thus:

“Boston, April —, 1866.

“My Dear Daughters:

“I am very glad that I can at last tell you something definite with regard to the business which brought me to Boston, and which will soon be happily completed. You remember the Mrs. Haverleigh whom I attended last fall through a dangerous illness? Well, the admiration I conceived for her then has since ripened into what, if I were a younger man, I should call love.”

“Love!” Fan repeated, scornfully. “Love! and he almost sixty years old. If he were not my father, I’d call him a fool!”

“No fool so big as an old fool!” came explosively from Phyllis, whose turban seemed bristling with rage as she spoke out exactly what was in my mind.

“You here?” Fan said, angrily. “Go away about your business.”

But Phyllis did not budge. She was a part of us. What concerned us concerned her, and in this crisis she meant to stand by us and learn the best or worst there was to learn.

“Where was I?” Fan asked, and Jack, who did not look as disturbed as I thought he ought, suggested, “Love!”

“Oh yes: ‘ripened into love.’ Ripened into fiddlesticks,” Fan said, and read on:

“When I left home I was not quite certain as to the result of my errand, but I am now. Mrs. Haverleigh has consented to marry me on Thursday evening of this week at eight o’clock, and I am writing this in the hope it may reach you that evening, and that you will send me your congratulations, in spirit at least. Mrs. Haverleigh is a remarkable woman,—very fine-looking, and about forty, I imagine, although she does not look it. I have never asked her age. She has traveled extensively,—is well educated, and belongs to some of the best families of New England. Indeed, I believe she traces her ancestry back in a direct line to Miles Standish of the Mayflower.”

“I never could bear Standish. What business had he to think of Priscilla when he had had a Rose?” Fan said, with an upward tilt of her nose. “Best families in New England! Humbug! as if that made her any better. Don’t we belong to some of the best families in the south?”

Then she read on:

“She is a member of several clubs and societies, and has most excellent ideas with regard to bringing up children. In this respect she will be invaluable in training little Katy, who I think manages herself mostly.”

“I don’t want to be trained,” Katy interrupted, with a whimper.

“And you are not going to be trained either,” Fan said, drawing the child close to her. Then she added:

“Let’s see what other virtue this paragon possesses. Oh, yes:”

“She is also, an incomparable housekeeper,—thorough in every thing, and will relieve you of all care.”

“Hm! I didn’t know we had any care; Phyllis takes all that,” Fan said.

“Dat’s so, honey,” came from Phyllis, who was standing behind her, stiff as a stake, while Fan continued:

“She is wealthy, too, and inclined to be very generous with me. She knows my circumstances perfectly, and how the war impoverished us, and has made over to me more than enough to pay my debts and have something left.”

“Very unmanly in father to take her money. I must say I am disappointed in him in more ways than one,” was Fan’s next remark, before continuing:

“I do not yet understand why she is willing to leave her handsome house in Boston and come to our plain, run-down home, but she is, and as soon as possible she will have sent to us a part of her furniture, together with her cook and housemaid and probably a coachman. This will be a great help to Phyllis, who is getting old, and who, while she does well for us, can hardly meet the requirements of a Boston housekeeper.”

“For de Lord’s sake, has ole Mas’r done gone perfec’ly daff over dat widder? Me getting ole! who knows how ole I am? I don’t, nor Mas’r either. What for dat woman bringin’ white trash down har to boss me? I not stan’ it!” Phyllis broke in with a flourish of the knives and forks she had in her hand, one of which flew off at right angles and came near hitting Jack in the head.

“Got it,” he said laughingly, as he picked up the knife and replaced it on the table, while Fan turned to Phyllis and said, “You here yet? Didn’t I tell you to leave long ago?”

“Yes, honey, but I’s har jess de same, an’ I’s gwine to stay, too, an’ spress my ‘pinion of dis yer Massachusetts woman fotchin’ her truck whar I’s sarved this forty year, an’ never started to run away but onet, when de sojers tell me de fine stories of freedom. What does I want of freedom? Nothin’. I’d be sold down de river to-day to sarve you, but I won’t be,—what you call it,—trampled on by dem whites. No, sir!” and here she turned to Jack, shaking her fist at him. “No, sir! An’ shoo’s you bawn, ef dey tries it, dar’ll be wah! Yes, wah! Wus than t’other, an’ dis time it’ll be de Federates an’ not de Fed’s who beats. Bet your soul on dat. Now I’ve had my say; I’se gwine.”

She nearly shook off her turban, which stood up almost a foot as she marched out of the room, followed by Jack’s hearty, “Three cheers for Phyllis! Good for you!”

“Is there more?” I asked, as Phyllis disappeared, and Fan continued:

“We are going to New York and Washington, and shall reach home in ten days or two weeks at the most. Will telegraph you when to expect us. I need not ask you to receive your new mother cordially and kindly. As ladies and my daughters you can hardly do otherwise. You will love her when you know her. I should like you to call her mother, but if you feel that you cannot, I shall not insist. Katy, of course, will address her as mamma. She has never had a daughter and will take to the child at once. She has a son who is now at Andover, but who will spend his summer vacation with us. He is fifteen or sixteen,—a fine, handsome lad, with all the polish and manner of twenty-five. He seems delighted with the prospect of having sisters. He calls you that already and is especially desirous to see little Katy, whose photograph I have with me and have shown him. He is here this evening and sends his love, and says tell you he expects a great deal of pleasure with you in the summer. His name is Carl. Mrs. Haverleigh, also, wishes to be kindly remembered. If you care to write to me, direct to Ebbett House, Washington.

“Lovingly your father,

“Samuel Hathern.”

After the reading of the letter there was silence for a few moments, broken only by the sound of the rain which was still falling heavily, the crackling of the pine knots on the hearth and the ticking of the clock. Glancing up at it at last Fan said, “They were to be married at eight. There is a difference of time between Boston and Richmond. The ceremony is over, and we have lost our father.”

Then she began to cry and I cried with her, while Jack tried to comfort us, telling us to look on the bright side,—that it might not be so bad after all. We had had one stepmother and loved her, and we might love another.

“That was very different from a Boston woman, who belongs to clubs and societies and has views, and all that,” Fan said. “We did love Katy’s mother. She was like us, and didn’t want to turn the house upside down with her raging housekeeping, as this woman will. She was easy-going, and she gave us Katy.”

Putting her arm around the little girl, Fan drew her closely to her with a gesture as if shielding her from some threatened danger. Assured that she was not to be trained, Katy looked upon the marriage rather favorably, and smoothing Fan’s hair caressingly, she said, “Don’t cry, the new mother will be nice, and then there’s brother Carl. I am so glad for him. I’ve wanted a brother ever since Charlie died, and after you told me to pray for what I wanted, I did pray, first for a doll that shut its eyes, and I got it,—then for a hoop, and I got it,—and then for a boy-brother, and we’ve got him. I get everything I want.”

Katy’s faith in prayer was very strong, and Fan, who had taught her this faith, could not discourage it now, although wishing that her prayers had taken some other object than a boy-brother.

That night on our way to bed we stopped for a moment at father’s room, the door of which stood open. In the winter, when there was no company in the house, it was really our living room, where most of our evenings were spent. Our father liked it warm when he came in at night, and there was always a bright fire on the hearth, with his arm-chair and slippers on one side, and next it the stand, with his book and paper and spectacles upon it, for he often read aloud to us, with Katy’s bright head resting on his knee, while Fan and I sewed, or embroidered, sitting on the settee rocker opposite him. This was all over now. A stranger had come between us, who would sit by father’s side while his children shifted for themselves. Some such thoughts as these were in our minds when we stepped into the room which we had taken so much pains to make attractive for his home coming.

“I wish we had let it alone,—must and all,” Fan said. “I am glad we couldn’t buy a new chamber set. Let her bring her own, as I dare say she will. I mean to take my pink pin cushion away. I didn’t put it here for her.”

But she left it. I knew she would, as she always subsided into quiet after a storm. We sat up late that night talking the matter over, and decided finally to make the best of it for father’s sake and never let him, nor any one but Jack, know that the new wife was not acceptable. We couldn’t deceive Phyllis, however, nor console her either, and for two days she went about the house with the tears dropping from her nose and running down her cheeks. “It was not so much the missus she ’jected to,” she said, “though it was bad enough to be sot on and bossed around by a stranger when she had been fust so long. It was the po’ white trash comin’ down with their a’rs that she couldn’t stan’, an’ wouldn’t. She’d run away fust! an’ if they sot the dogs on her she’d drown herself in the river; then see how ole mas’r’d feel when they brought her home drownded like a rat!”

Notwithstanding there was nothing to run from Phyllis was always threatening to run when disturbed or displeased, but had never contemplated suicide before, and now, in her pity for herself and for us when she should be fished from the river, limp and dead, she forgot the new mistress in a measure, and on the second day asked if she hadn’t better wash the windows again in master’s room. The marriage was generally known by this time, but no one congratulated us and few spoke of it at all. Evidently, it did not meet with approbation. Always perverse and contradictory, this silence on the part of our friends made Fan angry, and turned the tide in favor of the stranger. “Father had a right to marry if he chose, and the neighbors were very impudent to object,” she said, and, greatly to my surprise, she began to evince a good deal of interest in the coming of Mrs. Hathern. To Katy the new mother was to be mamma, but to us, Mrs. Hathern, and it seemed to me Fan took special pains to repeat the name as often as possible.

“I am trying to get used to it, but oh, how I hate it all. I’ll not let people know though,” she said to me, with quivering lips, and then she broke down and sobbed hysterically, declaring that she’d run away with Phyllis and drown herself, or marry Col. Errington. She hadn’t answered his letter yet, but she would that very day.

Possibly she might have done so if the post had not brought us a letter mailed in Andover and directed in a large boyish hand to “The Misses Hathern.” It was from Carl, who wrote:

“Dear Fanny and Annie and Katy:

“I am awfully glad that you are my sisters, and I am going to tell you about the wedding. I was there and saw your father endow my mother with all his worldly goods and heard her promise to obey him. She won’t do it, though, you bet. They mostly never do, I guess, and mother least of all. They seem happy as clams; so I suppose old people can be in love as well as young. I shouldn’t like mother to know I said that. She’d be mad as a hornet. She thinks she’s young, but she will be forty next birthday. She is a very handsome woman though. I never wanted mother to marry. She has had offers as thick as huckleberries, and I kicked at them all until I saw your father, and then I gave in and told her that she might. I like him immensely and I’m going to like you, especially little Katy, she’s so lovely. Your father showed me her photograph, and finally gave it to me, I begged so hard. I’ve shown it to the boys, and made them green with envy by telling them of the good times I am to have next summer in the Virginia woods and hills and in the old house with you. I hate the city, and like the country, and always wanted to go south. I was sorry I was not old enough to enlist in the army;—not to shoot anybody, but to see the country. I suppose you were rebels. Well, that’s right. I should have been, too, if I had been born south; but I’m a northerner, and yelled myself hoarse when I heard our men were in Richmond. I was in the country, and I and a lot more boys stole so many dry-goods boxes and barrels and wood for a bonfire that one old copperhead, whose chicken coop we took, had us arrested. Between you and I,—you and me, I mean,—I don’t believe your father is more than half a reb, or he wouldn’t sit so quiet and hear mother rake the south. She’s peppery. I said to her it wasn’t good form, and she told me to shut up, and I shut! I generally do when she tells me to.

“I wish you’d write to me. I like girls immensely, and they like me, but only one has ever written to me, and that didn’t count. It was Julina Smith,—mother’s maid,—two or three years older than I am. I’m fifteen. She is rather spoony, and made me a pair of slippers and sent them to me with a letter in which she called me ‘Dear Carl,’ and ended with ‘Your loving Julina.’ The slippers were well enough, if she wanted to give them to me, but the loving Julina was a little too much. I tore the letter up, and when I went home and she made eyes at me I told her to dry up, and she dried. I believe mother intends taking her to Virginia, and if she does you will have to set on her, I can tell you.

“It is nearly class-time and I must stop. I am studying Greek and Latin and a lot more stuff, and expect to enter Harvard when I know enough. And now, in the words of the divine Julina, or Julienne as she’d like to be called, seeing there’s French blood in her,

“Yours lovingly,

“Carl Haverleigh.”

“P. S. I guess you’ll like me. Girls generally do, although they say I am fickle and pretend a lot I don’t mean. But I mean it at the time. I can’t always keep up to concert pitch when the concert is over, nor keep smelling a rose after its perfume is gone. Now that sounds rather poetical and neat, don’t it?

“Yours again, Carl.”

This letter, over which we laughed till we cried, helped to turn our thoughts from the dreaded stepmother to the bright, frank boy, whom we felt sure we should like, during the concert, at least, and while the perfume of the rose lasted. Fan read most of the letter to Phyllis, who, at its commencement, stood with her hands on her hips, her elbows elevated and her nose in the air. But before its close her nose and elbows came down and a broad smile broke over her face.

“Bress de boy!” she said. “‘Pears like mas’r Charlie, only in course ’taint to be ’spected he’s so peart-like seein’ he’s from de norf, whar dey’s all so onery.”

“But, Phyllis,” Fan said, “he is from Boston, and must have a heap of Boston culture.”

“What’s dat ar?” Phyllis asked, but Fan did not explain, and left Phyllis wondering if Boston culture was ‘catchin’.

Chapter VII.—Author’s Story.
THE COMING OF THE BRIDE.

The two weeks which Dr. Hathern had mentioned as the longest possible time before his return were nearly up, and his daughters were daily expecting some message from him telling when he would be home. They had become somewhat accustomed to thoughts of the new mother and the new order of things she was to inaugurate, and felt that there might be some compensation.

“It will be rather fine to have a posse of servants,—white ones, too,” Fan said. “We shall quite outshine the Lovering people with our style. Coachman,—that means carriage and horses,—cook, maid, besides Phyllis, who, I suppose, will be the laundress. That will give us all the white skirts and dresses we want. I dote on white skirts.”

Fan was rather luxurious in her tastes and would have liked nothing better than fresh white skirts and linen every day, and would have had them, too, but for her compassion on Phyllis, who usually had a “fetched misery in her back” on Monday, and a worse one on ironing day, if there were too many frillicks, as she called them, in the wash. The prospect of new furniture was not, on the whole, displeasing, although they were greatly attached to the solid old-fashioned things which had belonged to their mother. Still it would not be out of place to excel their neighbors, inasmuch as they were what Phyllis termed the “fustest family in town.” On the whole, they began to feel quite reconciled to the marriage, and took a good deal of pains to make the house as attractive as possible for the bride. They had Phyllis’s word that it was as clean as soap and water and her two hands could make it, and as they never thought of peering into corners they contented themselves with little changes here and there, which they thought were artistic.

It was now May and the garden was full of early flowers, with which they meant to brighten the rooms at the last.

A letter had come from Miss Errington, who had noticed among the arrivals at the Ebbitt House the names of Dr. Samuel Hathern and wife, Lovering, Va., and as she knew there was but one Lovering in Virginia, and but one Dr. Samuel Hathern in Lovering, she felt sure it was their father with a new wife and had ventured to call.

“They received me in their private parlor,” she wrote, “and I was charmed with your father. Such a genial, courtly gentleman of the old school and so proud of his bride. She is a very handsome, well-preserved woman, and is au fait in everything pertaining to etiquette,—and knows how to dress perfectly. She has a good deal of Boston manner, and I should say decided views on most things. I imagine there may be a little Scotch blood in her, which accounts for a certain accent in her speech. She seems to be well educated, and, like myself, is very fond of music. Indeed, she is quite up in that, and, remembering little Katy’s wonderful voice, I spoke of it and said I hoped she might have every facility in the way of music. She assured me she would see to it, and what she says she means; there is no doubt of that. On the whole, you are to be congratulated on having a superior woman for a stepmother.”

There was a good deal more of irrelevant matter, with one or two allusions to her brother, who was about going abroad on business. But over this the sisters passed hastily. Their interest centered in the mother.

“Scotch descent,—Boston manners and views. I knew she had views,” Fan said, with a toss of her head. “She is woman’s rights and runs an abolition society, I dare say, or did before the war. Fine musician; I wish Miss Errington would mind her business about Katy. I wonder what madam will think of our old rattle-trap of a piano. Very likely she will bring us a Steinway or a Chickering.”

This letter, instead of reassuring the sisters, made them rather uneasy with regard to the cultivated woman with views. What would she think of them, who had scarcely been outside of Lovering, and who knew so little of the world?

“I reckon I shall hate her, after all,” Fan thought, as she began to pull herself together and to remember sundry acts of abandon and bits of slang in which she sometimes indulged and which would be hard to give up.

Annie, on the contrary, who never shocked anyone, and whom her sister called a flat iron, or a flat, from her propensity to smooth matters and make the best of them, began to feel again her old dread of the new mother and to wonder how one so inferior as herself would impress so much superiority. The next day there came a telegram from their father, who was in Richmond and would be home the following evening at six o’clock. There was also a letter from Jack, who wrote hurriedly:

“Dear Fan-and-Ann. Veni, vidi, vici. Brush up your Latin and translate, but make it third person, with she, instead of first. To be brief: I called at the Spotswood this evening, and looking over the register, as I often do, saw in your father’s handwriting ‘Dr. Samuel Hathern and wife, Lovering, Va.’ In a jiff I sent up my card, and in another jiff I was shaking hands with Mrs. Hathern, who received me as if I were her son, or brother, and nearly looked me through with those eyes of hers which see everything. Whether they are black or blue, white or gray, I can’t tell, but I think they are black. You can’t get away from them; they follow you like the eyes of some portraits I have seen,—my grandmother’s for instance, which hangs in our dining-room. I never could steal a lump of sugar or poke my thumb into the honey pot because she was always looking at me. Just so with Mrs. Hathern. She lights on you and holds you and seems to be going clear down to a fellow’s boots and reading his inmost thoughts. She is handsome and stylish and had on the best fitting dress I ever saw. Looked as if she were run into it. I’ve no doubt she is a blood relation of Miles Standish and all the other chaps who came over in the Mayflower. She is very dignified but not exactly like our Southern ladies. Maybe it is her voice, which is strong and full and decided, and would make you jump if you were doing anything bad. To-morrow I am to have the honor of driving with her around the town and showing her the nakedness of the land, and I assure you it is very naked. I could shed buckets full of tears over the ruins of our once fair city, but it’s no good crying for spilt milk. Better go to work and get some more. She wishes to go first to Libby Prison. Think of it! I a Reb, and she a Fed, hob-nobbing in that place. She must have forgotten herself when she said to me with so much concern in her voice, ‘I trust you were never so unfortunate as to be a prisoner there.’

“I think even Fan would have been pleased with my dignified manner as I replied, ‘Madam, I had the honor to wear the grey, and there was no possibility of my being a prisoner in Libby.’

“‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ she said, with a look which made me feel like a cut-throat and murderer, and as if I ought to have been in Libby, or some worse place, all my life.

“Then her eyes lighted up and a most wonderful smile broke out over her face, changing its expression entirely. I think that smile must have won your father. It made even me feel kind of so-so,—queer-like, you know. He seems very proud and fond of her. Calls her ‘Matty,’ and once when she thought I did not hear her she called him ‘Sam’!”

“Disgusting!” Fan exclaimed. “Sam! our father, Dr. Hathern! Sam, indeed! I knew she was vulgar, with all of her Standish blood. Sam! The idea!”

After this Fan had scarcely patience to finish the letter, which had but little more in it of the bride.

The next morning the young ladies were up betimes. As a rule they were not early risers, especially when their father was away. Nine and even ten o’clock sometimes found them in bed, while Phyllis kept their breakfast warm and made no signs of protest, unless there was a greater amount of work than usual and she was very tired. Then to herself she would call them onery and shiffless, and wonder what their poor mother would say if she knew how no-count they were, lyin’ bed hours after sun up. The morning after the receipt of the telegram, however, they were up with the sun and found Phyllis preparing the most appetizing breakfast she could think of, and occasionally wiping away a big tear before it dropped from her nose.

“De po’ lambs should have one more meal in peace before the missus come,” she said, as she served her cream toast and corn muffins and urged them to eat.

Katy was the only one who did justice to the muffins and toast. Fanny and Annie could only make a pretense of eating, and when breakfast was over Fanny said with a hysterical laugh, “I am going to the graves to tell mother and Charlie and the boy who is coming to-day. I don’t believe they know.”

A moment later she was walking rapidly across the field to the hillside cemetery, where she staid for a long time.

What she said to the dead, if anything, no one ever knew. When she came back there were traces of tears on her face, but otherwise she was calm.

“Do you know,” she said to Annie, “that the boy seems very near to me this morning. I can see his great blue eyes looking wistfully at me as they did when he said ‘Don’t let her find me.’ Do as I will, they follow me as if they wanted to tell me something.”

Annie was accustomed to her sister’s theory that the dead are cognizant of what interests us, and only shivered a little as she replied, “I am glad I am not haunted with dead eyes. It is enough to think of the living ones which Jack says see everything, and will be sure to know if these rooms are not in order.”

Annie, who was more practical and more housewifely in her instincts than Fanny, was already at work and had brought from the garden and yard quantities of flowers,—roses and peonies and snowballs and lilies,—which lay heaped upon the dining-room table, with every vase and bowl and available pitcher in the house. Fan’s forte was decoration, and she at once went to work with a will, fashioning the flowers into bouquets and whistling as she worked, sometimes Dixie, and sometimes John Brown’s Body, which last she said was probably the bride’s favorite. If the boy’s eyes haunted her they acted as a stimulant, urging her on until the house was full of flowers and odorous with perfume. The last room visited was Charlie’s, where the uniforms of grey and blue were hanging, over one the stars and stripes,—over the other, the stars and bars. This was a sacred spot. Fan never whistled there, nor sung, and she stepped softly and spoke low as she put the bowl of forget-me-nots on the stand under the faded coats, where the bloodstains of Charley and the boy were showing. It seemed to her that many eyes were upon her now, and she began to feel nervous as she gently patted the pillow over which Charlie’s head used to lie, and where the boy’s had lain when he shouted a tiger for her and died.

“Poor boy!” she said to herself, as she left the room, “Had you no friends, and shall we never know who you were, or where you came from?”

After the early dinner they laid the table for supper, bringing out the best linen and china and glass, wondering where the mother would choose to sit that first night. It had been Annie’s prerogative to preside over the coffee urn. This must, of course, eventually be given up, and might as well be done first as last. So the Dresden plate, the one pearl handled knife and fork, both heirlooms from their grandmother, and kept mostly to look at, were put with the tea-cups and saucers, and the arm-chair their mother and Katy’s had used was wheeled to its place. For a moment both Fanny and Annie stood by it with a hand upon it, while Annie said, “I wonder if mother knows or cares.”

“Knows! Yes,” Fanny replied, “but does not care. In Heaven they neither marry nor are given in marriage, so, what is it to her if father brings home as many wives as the Mormons,—four at once, I have heard. It is only we that care.”

When everything was in readiness the sisters went all over the house, feeling a kind of pride in it, with its wide hall in the centre, its two large rooms on either side, and its broad piazza, shaded with honeysuckles, clematis and woodbine, and a beautiful wild rose or eglantine, struggling with the three and throwing out masses of color against the dark leaves of its neighbors. It was an ideal Virginia home, and the Boston woman, with all her culture and views and advanced ideas must find it so, the sisters thought as they finished their inspection and sat down to wait for the train. Katy, who had been as much interested in the preparations as any one, had made two small bouquets which she put on her father’s bureau, with a card under each. On one was scrawled in a child’s almost illegible hand, “For papa, from Katy;” on the other, “From Katy to Mamma.” She was happy, and in her white dress and blue sash, with her fair hair falling around her shoulders in soft curls she made a lovely picture as she flitted from room to room, now consulting the kitchen clock, now the one in the dining-room and wondering if they would never come. At last the whistle was heard in the distance coming nearer and nearer and finally ceasing as the train drew up to the station. Fifteen minutes passed, seeming to the sisters an age, and the village ‘bus stopped at the gate, followed by the express wagon on which were two huge Saratoga trunks, a large valise and a hat box.

“Ought we go and meet them?” Annie said, in a whisper.

“No,” Fan replied. “It is enough for Katy to go.”

She was running down the walk, and with a glad cry threw herself into her father’s arms. Then, at a word from him, she gave her hand to the lady at his side, who stooped and kissed her. It had never yet occurred to her that every body did not love her and want her, and she held tightly to the lady on one side and to her father on the other, and so went hippity-hopping up the walk, telling them that the old cat had six kittens and the speckled hen thirteen chickens; that the house was beautiful with roses and things, and she had made two bouquets herself.

It was a very cold, callous heart which could withstand Katy, and Mrs. Hathern’s face wore a soft and pleased expression as she looked down at the little girl and then up at the two young ladies who had come out upon the piazza and whom the doctor presented to her as “My daughters, Fanny and Annie.”

Chapter VIII.—The Author’s Story Continued.
MRS. HATHERN.

She had taught a district school in a small town in Maine,—had been preceptress in a young ladies’ seminary in Calais,—a music teacher and organist in Portland,—and the wife and widow of Thomas Haverleigh, of Bangor, whom she had married mostly for his money, and for the broader field it would give her. Some years after his death she moved to Boston, where her restless, energetic nature found full scope in the many clubs and societies of which she became an active member. Her marriage with Dr. Hathern was a surprise to her friends, who knew how unlike the two were to each other. He was gentle, refined, wholly unselfish and rather weak where decided action was necessary; she strong, determined, and self-assured, with a will which no one could bend except her son Carl, and he sometimes failed. There could scarcely have been two people more unlike and possibly this dissimilarity of disposition was what attracted each to the other until both believed they were in what the lady called a middle-aged kind of love. In a letter to a friend she likened it to the Indian summer, which is often more satisfactory than the fervid heat of the real summer days. Whether it were Indian summer or June the doctor did not stop to consider. He was infatuated and only knew that he was supremely happy and never more so than when he reached home and was presenting his bride to his daughters. They were nervous and constrained, but she was wholly at her ease, while her eyes, which Jack said saw everything, did not belie his statement. They were very large and black and bright and took the two girls in at a glance, from their heads to their feet, making them feel rather uncomfortable. Fanny thought with some uneasiness of two missing buttons on her boots, while Annie remembered a little rent in her underskirt and wondered if it were visible.

“I am glad to see you and hope we shall be friends. Which is Fanny, and which Annie?” Mrs. Hathern said, and her voice seemed to fill the whole house, it was so distinct and decided, with a tone in it which some might call an accent, but which Fan-and-Ann pronounced a brogue, when comparing notes with regard to it.

Had she been a public speaker she could have thrown it into the farthest corner of the largest hall, but her hearers would not have said it was a pleasant voice. It was too self-assured and too full of a conviction that the opinions it expressed were the only opinions worth expressing.

Like most cold impassive natures she was not at all demonstrative and although quick to see and speak of whatever was wrong, or out of place, she seldom praised or expressed herself pleased with anything. That she made no comment was, she thought, a sufficient proof that she did not disapprove. Gush was especially distasteful to her, and she was glad not to meet it in her step-daughters.

She knew they must be nervous, but they were ladylike and quiet and received her kindly. They told her which was Fanny and which Annie, saying laughingly, “we are better known as Fan-and-Ann.” One took her satchel, the other her shawl, as they led the way into the house and showed her to her room. Fan, who was watching her closely, saw how rapidly her eyes traveled from one object to another, lighting finally upon an immense spider’s web in a corner, which had probably been there a week, as there were two or three dead flies already in it, and a freshly captured fourth was making a loud protest against its capture.

“Can I do anything for you?” Fan asked, with a view to draw attention from the offending web.

“No, thanks, I can get along quite well by myself,” was the reply, and acting upon the hint the girls left her alone and went to their father, who was seeing to the baggage, and whom they nearly knocked down as they seized him around the neck and smothered him with kisses.

“Why—why—why; bless my soul! What’s all this whirlwind for? and crying, too,” the Doctor said, folding them in his arms and feeling his own eyes moisten a little.

“We didn’t half tell you how glad we are to have you home, and we don’t mean to cry,” Fan said; “and we are not going to again; but just this little minute I can’t help it.”

“Yes, yes; there, there,” the doctor replied, patting first one head and then the other, “there’s nothing to cry about, I assure you, except for joy. She’s a very remarkable woman, and the wonder is that she could care for an old codger like me. We are going to be very happy, all of us. She has some elegant furniture coming, which will make the old house quite like a palace. You know you have wanted new furniture a long time.”

“Oh, father,” Fanny cried. “We would rather have you than all the fine furniture in the world; but we are going to be good; indeed we are.”

She was hugging him again with her arms around his neck on one side of him, while Annie’s were on the other, when they were startled with a call for Sam, which came echoing down the hall like the peal of a clarionet, making the four clinging arms drop suddenly, while the doctor struggled into an upright position and answered, “Yes, Matty, I am coming.”

Mrs. Hathern had removed her bonnet and investigated the room, deciding, with a radical woman’s quickness what changes she would make when her furniture came; deciding, too, that the windows had not been half washed and the window stools not at all, judging from the dust and dried leaves upon them. Then with her umbrella she demolished the big spider’s web and was proceeding to attack a smaller one in the vicinity of the bell rope, which she tried with no effect, when Katy came dancing into the room, her blue eyes showing the admiration she felt for her new mamma, whose grey dress and steel buttons she began to finger caressingly.

“I like you,” she said and moved by an impulse she could not resist Mrs. Hathern stooped and kissed the lovely face with something like a real mother feeling in her heart.

But nothing could change her nature, which was to discipline and mould whatever needed moulding and disciplining. So, when Katy, wishing to call attention to her gift of flowers, said to her, “Have you seen my flowers. I give ’em to you.” She answered promptly, “You mean you gave them to me. Little girls must learn to use good grammar. Yes, I see them; they are very pretty, but be careful or you will upset the vase and spill the water; better run out now, while I make my toilet.”

It was not so much the words as the tone with which they were spoken, which brought a slight shadow to Katy’s face as she started for the door, followed by Mrs. Hathern, who looked out into the hall in time to see the tableau at the farther end.

“Not as emotionless and impassive as I thought,” she said to herself, understanding it perfectly, and interrupting it with her call for Sam. She was given to the use of pet names; she had called her first husband Tom, and knew no reason why she should not call her second Sam. At first he rather liked it. He had been Sam when a boy, and it made him feel young again. But when he heard it in the presence of his daughters, it sounded differently, for he felt their disapproval of it.

“I can’t open my satchel,” she said, when he came to her. “Something is wrong with the lock, and how can I get some hot water. I have tried the bell three times with no response.”

In her voice there was something the doctor had not heard before, and, like Katy, he felt a passing shadow on his spirits, but he hastened to undo the lock of the satchel and said, apologetically: “Oh, yes, the bell. I knew the cord was broken. I will see to it at once, and the hot water, too. I’ll go for Phyllis to fetch it, I haven’t seen her yet.”

He found Phyllis in a mood which could not be described as angelic. She had spent an hour or so in clearing up her kitchen; had mopped the floor; shoved into dark corners pots, kettles, skillets and brooms, and arrayed herself in her red flowered gown and white apron, with her highest turban on her head. If her master had come alone, she would have gone with his daughters to greet him, but with a new mistress it was not to be thought of. “She reckoned she knowed her place,” she said; “whar she was raised niggers didn’t put on no a’rs. Marster would done fotch the new Misses to her, in course.” But as time went by and neither mistress nor master appeared, her wrath began to wax hot and to manifest itself in her own peculiar way.

“Whar is the use,” she reasoned, “clarin’ up an’ hidin’ things whar I can’t find ’em, if my lady is too fine to come inter de kitchen. No, sir! I’ll jess have ’em handy agin.”

Pots and kettles and skillets were brought from their hiding place and set down promiscuously on the hearth. The broom and mop followed next, and the duster was aimed at the door behind which it belonged, just escaping contact with the doctor’s head as he appeared. He had heard from his daughters of Phyllis’s propensity to throw things when on what they called a rampage, and concluded she was on one now.

“Ho, Phyllis,” he said in his cheery way. “What’s up, and why haven’t you come to welcome your new mistress?”

He offered her his hand, which Phyllis grasped firmly.

“I’se mighty glad to see you, Mas’r,” she said, “an’ I’se gwine to do my duty, but for de dear Lord’s sake whar was de sense for a new Misses. Et kind of upsots one to think of dem t’others what’s dead an’ gone.”

This was the first real set-back the doctor had received, and it hurt his pride that his servant should disapprove of what seemed to him so desirable. But in his usual kind way he soothed the old negress, who assured him again that she meant to do her duty and bar everything for his sake and the young misseses. Filling a pitcher with hot water, which took a few minutes to heat, she followed him to his room, where Mrs. Hathern stood with a hint of a cloud on her face at the long delay, and because the pitcher had a broken nose and a suspicion of pot black on the handle. She prided herself on never losing her temper to the extent of showing it in her voice or manner. In a quiet, determined way she could sting with her tongue and smile while she did it. Bowing graciously to Phyllis she said, “I thought perhaps you had forgotten the hot water, and I have washed me in cold, but you can leave the pitcher, and please wipe off that black spot which you probably did not see.”

Phyllis explained, as she rubbed off the pot black, that “de water bilin’ in de tea kettle was hard as rocks and not fit for ladies to wash in, an’ she had to blow up the fi’ to heat some soff.” Then, putting the pitcher down with a thump she bounced out of the room. She had taken Mrs. Hathern’s measure, and Mrs. Hathern had taken hers, and neither was very satisfactory.

“She ain’t no mo’ like Miss Carline or Miss Nellie than I’m like Mas’r General Lee,” she said, and there was a stormy look in her eyes when she went in at last to wait upon the table, where Mrs. Hathern presided as easily as if she had all her life sat in the arm-chair she was the third to occupy.

She was a woman of theories and maxims to which she adhered rigidly. Among these were, “Early to bed and early to rise,”—“An hour in the morning is worth two at night,” and so forth. Accordingly, the next morning at six o’clock she was out upon the piazza looking very cool and handsome in her gown of lavender and white, open in front to show her embroidered petticoat as was the fashion of the time. Everything about her dress and person was spotless, and she impressed one with the idea that she had just been scrubbed and ironed. Her hair was never out of place; her collars and cuffs never soiled, or her garments crumpled or torn. Cleanliness she held next to godliness, and shiftlessness and untidiness next to sin. Born and reared amid the thrift and energy and activity of New England, she had no idea of or sympathy with the happy-go-lucky manner of living in the Hathern family, with Phyllis at its head. Hearing no stir, and seeing no signs of life in the dining-room, except a few flies busy with some crumbs left on the cloth the night before, she found her way to the kitchen, where Phyllis was very leisurely making preparations for breakfast. Later on, before presenting herself at the table, she was intending to don her Sunday apparel, but now, as the morning was very hot, her dress might be described as decolleté. A faded calico skirt, which scarcely reached her bare ankles, and a loose, thin sacque which showed all the creases and curves of her portly figure, comprised her entire make-up as she stood with her back to the door, stirring her batter for griddle cakes, and all unconscious of the foe bearing down upon her.

With a warning cough Mrs. Hathern stepped across the threshold, so startling the old negress that she dropped the egg she was about to break into the batter.

“Oh, my Lord, how you done skeered me,” she exclaimed, lifting both hands, in one of which was the dripping spoon. “Does you want anything, honey?”

Phyllis was very religious, and a leader at the meetings held in some of the freedmen’s cabins, where pandemonium usually reigned and the Lord was entreated as if he were deaf, or asleep. She had attended one of these the previous night, and on her way home had told a crony whom she met how she had rassled in pra’r, and had asked others to rassel, too, that she might have grace to do her duty. As a result of her rassling she was in quite a conciliatory frame of mind, and the word honey came from her involuntarily.

“I am not one of the young ladies, I am Mrs. Hathern,” the latter said, holding up her dainty skirts as she walked around the broken egg and the pots and kettles which Phyllis had not yet put away. “What time do you usually have breakfast?” she asked, and Phyllis replied, “Oh, we ain’t perticular, mos’ any time when dey gits up,—eight, nine,—sometimes ten,—jess as happens.”

Mrs. Hathern looked aghast. Such habits as these she was not prepared for, and she would not allow them either.

“Very well,” she said, “that may have answered in the past; for the future we will have breakfast in the summer at seven, sharp,—and at eight in the winter.”

In Phyllis’s astonishment the second egg, which she had brought from the cupboard, was in danger of following its companion.

“In de Lord’s name, how’s you gwine to git de young ladies up, or marster, either so airly. Why, it’ll take a hoss team to do it,” she said, and Mrs. Hathern replied, “I shall see to that, and you will see to the breakfast until my cook comes, when she will take your place.”

Phyllis bridled at once and her turban began to topple on one side. But she remembered her duty, and asked, very respectfully, “When is she comin’?”

“Very soon, I hope, and a housemaid with her,—both capable servants, who are accustomed to keep everything in order. The sight of your kitchen would drive them crazy. Do you always cook by a fireplace? Have you no stove?”

Phyllis snorted,—a sure sign that she was forgetting her duty.

“Stove!” she repeated. “One dem squar’ black things, a burnin’ and blisterin’ your han’s! No sir! Ole Miss Fullerton done got one before de wah, and dat fool of a Rache buil’d de fi’ in de oven, an when de smoke an’ de fi’ bust out, she screeched so dat Mas’r Hathern went over an’ put it out, an’ tole ’em whar to make de fi’. He’s from de norf, whar all such truck as stoves comes from, an’ he larf fit to split his sides when he seen de fi’ in de oven. No, sir! No stove for me!”

“Such shiftlessness!” was Mrs. Hathern’s mental comment, as she went back to the piazza where she found her husband, and sat down to wait for breakfast with what patience she could command and to think how she could best change the habits of this “sozzling household.”

That was what she called it in the first letter she wrote her son, telling him to go at once to her house and expedite the departure of Norah and Julina. He was also to order the best range in Boston and have it sent to her immediately, with all necessary furnishing.

“Think of a big fireplace,” she wrote, “with a crane and tin ovens and pots and kettles and spiders and the water pail, with a gourd on the top, all in a clutter, and a huge negress, weighing at least two hundred, standing in the midst, with nothing on but a short petticoat and loose sacque! That is what I found the first morning when I went to the kitchen to see if breakfast were ready. We didn’t have it until eight o’clock, and that was too early for Miss Fanny, who did not appear until we were nearly through. I have ordered it for seven hereafter. I cannot begin too soon to change the loose habits the girls have acquired from having had so many blacks to wait upon them before the war, and depending wholly upon Phyllis since. She almost breathes for them, and they let her. To do her justice she looks very respectable when she comes into the dining-room and she waits at table remarkably well. It is a very pleasant, roomy house, with wide verandas above and below, broad hall in the centre, with fireplace in one corner, and doors opening at either end. But it is greatly run down,—old, faded carpets and rickety furniture—and in the bedroom I intend for you a broken-legged bureau, propped up on a brick. We should call this second class at the north, but they are really among the first people in the town, and don’t seem to know how dilapidated they are, or if they do they are too proud to show it. I refer now to the girls. The Doctor admits that things are not quite as they ought to be. He is a thorough gentleman, and I am more and more convinced of the wisdom of my choice. Fanny and Annie are bright, pretty girls, especially Fanny, who is the ruling spirit and mouth-piece for her sister. Katy, the youngest, is a beauty, but spoiled. I do not think she knows what restraint is, but I must restrain her, and mould her as a child should be moulded. She will then make a splendid woman. The twins are, I fear, beyond my control. Fanny certainly is, and there is a fire in her black eyes I should not care to rouse. I forgot to tell you that there is a wide lawn in front of the house, with a long avenue leading to the street, shaded with elms and maples. The garden is full of flower beds bordered with old-fashioned box, and there are roses and honeysuckles and running vines everywhere. In the rear a grassy lane leads to the woods, which at times during the war were full of soldiers, both northern and southern. The war still broods like a plague over Virginia, although I cannot help feeling that some of the people make it an excuse for what is only the result of years of indolence and indifference to anything like thrift and energy.”

Carl’s answer to this letter was prompt and characteristic. “I went to the house,” he wrote, “meeting Julina in the street. She informed me that Miss O’Rourke was giving a lunch to some of her friends, and had sent her after oil for the salad. So you see, ‘when the cat’s away the mice will play.’ Norah seemed as meek as Moses when she saw me, and if a lunch was in progress she gave no sign of it. Perhaps Julina lied; it’s like her. Miss O’Rourke informed me that after getting the house ready for the new tenant, she must visit her grandmother and ‘rest up’ before going south, and Julina will ‘rest up’ with her. So I don’t know when you will see their ladyships. What a delightful picture you give of the Elms. Double piazzas, wide hall, big rooms, avenues, gardens, roses and woods, to say nothing of pots and kettles and pans and a 200-pounder, all huddled together in the kitchen, and a bureau propped up with a brick! I like that. It reminds me of our first visit to the sea shore, with a cottage full of broken furniture, and so leaky that when it rained we had to set with washtubs over our heads. What a field you have in which to exercise your executive ability and love of change; but don’t go to bossing little Katy, or make her sit in chairs and go to bed without her supper, as you did me, and don’t introduce that new order of ‘early to bed and early to rise’ until I have had a chance to enjoy the old easy-going régime you hold in so much contempt. Let the girls sleep, if they want to. I remember how you used to snake Paul and me out of bed at the most unearthly hours until he ran away, and I got weakly and the doctor told you I must have all the sleep I could get. How I hated the early bird which caught the worm, or rather the worm for getting up to be caught. I am going to like the girls, and shall probably fall in love with all three; that’s my way, you know. Perhaps Katy is too young. Eight isn’t she? while the twins are eighteen. I am nearly sixteen, am five feet ten and trying to raise a beard. Not an infant, you see.”

This letter was not altogether satisfactory to Mrs. Hathern, whose usual smooth brow was somewhat wrinkled and whose voice and manner had an increase of energy and decision when she went back to the posse of negroes at work in different parts of the house. There was a great upheaval in progress, which Annie, who was an eye-witness to it in all its details, will describe in another chapter.

Chapter IX.—Annie’s Story.
THE UPHEAVAL.

My coadjutor, the Author, has told how the new mother came home to us on a lovely May afternoon, when we had made the old house bright with flowers and schooled ourselves to receive her as our father’s wife should be received by his daughters. We had heard she was a remarkable woman and a handsome woman, and we were not disappointed. She was handsome, with the brightest and blackest eyes I ever saw,—dark, glossy hair,—not one of which ever dared get out of place,—brilliant complexion and regular features, if I except her nose, which inclined upward a little, and her chin, which receded in proportion as her nose went up. And she was remarkable, too, and so different from any type of woman we had ever seen that she took our breath away, and for a few days we were in a state of collapse and bewilderment. She was a highly educated woman, bristling all over with views and theories and maxims, one of which was “never to let the grass grow under her feet, if there was anything to do.” And she didn’t let it grow, but plunged at once into the midst of a domestic cyclone, which not only swept away for the time being all our comfort, but, also, the good opinions we had entertained of ourselves as housekeepers and young ladies of judgment.

We had never dreamed that we were as shiftless and no account and dilapidated a set as we came to believe ourselves in the new light shed upon us and our surroundings. We knew that our furniture was old and our carpets worn, but we had a pride in and an affection for them because they had belonged to our mother, and we thought the house was clean, and we told Mrs. Hathern so when she suggested a regular tear up such as was customary in New England twice a year. For answer to our assertion that we had been scrubbed from attic to cellar she smiled a pitying kind of smile at our ignorance, and rubbing her hand over the top of a door brought off an amount of black which appalled us. We had never thought of looking on the top of doors for dirt. But her eyes went everywhere, and she went with them and wrote against us “weighed in the balance and found wanting.” Everything was wrong, especially in the kitchen, where, she said, Norah O’Rourke would not stay a day. Privately, Fan and I thought she was more than half afraid of Norah O’Rourke, whom she quoted so constantly and for whom it seemed to us our hitherto quiet house was turned inside out. Two carpenters were brought into the kitchen, where an extra window was cut so that Norah O’Rourke could have more light and air; a new cupboard was built for Norah O’Rourke’s iron utensils, which Phyllis had kept anywhere, so that they were handy; there was a sink for Norah O’Rourke’s dish-washing, and stationary tubs for Norah O’Rourke’s laundrying. The ceiling was whitewashed; the walls painted a light drab and the floor snuff color, and when everything was in readiness for Norah O’Rourke, except the range which had not come, that lady’s quarters were certainly a great improvement upon the dark, dingy room where Phyllis had reigned supreme so long.

Just what her position in the household was to be when Norah O’Rourke arrived we did not know, as Mrs. Hathern was reticent on that point. That she didn’t like Phyllis, and Phyllis didn’t like her, was an assured fact, but there was as yet no open rupture between them. Mrs. Hathern was evidently trying to control her temper, while Phyllis was conscientiously striving to do her duty. I think she rassled in pra’r at the night meetings a great many times during the toss up, which extended from the kitchen to the house proper, where, as Fan wrote to Jack, “The old Harry held high carnival.” Had I then read Jane Carlyle’s life and letters, as I have since, I should have sympathized with her fully in her despair and discomposure when her lord came home full of bile and raised Cain generally. As it was with that house at No. 5 Cheyne Row, so it was with our house under the Elms. Carpets came up, curtains came down, furniture was banished to the attic to make room for the new that was coming. Paper was torn from the walls and lay in long mouldy strips upon the floor. Pails of suds, with mops and brooms and brushes and four colored women who had been pressed into service in order to expedite matters, were everywhere, together with plumbers and painters and upholsterers and paper-hangers brought from Richmond to assist in the mélee.

In her cambric dress and white apron, which never showed a particle of soil, and a dainty little cap, with a lavender bow, perched on the top of her head, Mrs. Hathern moved among her forces like a brigadier-general, urging them on as they had never been urged before in their lives. The women, however, baffled her. They were not accustomed to the Yankee quick step, and if she left one washing a window while she went to look after another, she was very apt on her return to find the window washer setting in a rocking chair or rummaging through a bureau drawer. Dire were the complaints she made about the blacks. She was a rank abolitionist during the war, she said, but if she had known what a good-for-nothing race they were, she shouldn’t have troubled herself about them, and she’d like nothing better now than to thrash them if she could. But they were free and her ekles one of them told her during a hot controversy over a window which was washed three times before it suited.

Had there been nothing except a battle between Boston energy and Virginia slowness, Fan and I might have enjoyed it, knowing that out of the confusion order would finally come, but a more serious matter was daily confronting us in the shape of little Katy’s misdemeanors. We never knew before that she had any, but now we found that of all children to get into mischief and tear her clothes she was the worst. She enjoyed the commotion and was always in the thickest of it. Naturally she soiled her dress and apron and hands, for which she was promptly reproved and punished. Sometimes she was made to sit for an hour or more in a high chair near the bureau in father’s bedroom. For diversion she was told to commit either the collect for the day, or several verses in the Bible, beginning with the sermon on the mount, the number of verses varying according to the heinousness of her offense. Sometimes, if the rent in her dress were longer and the soil worse than usual, she was sent to bed and kept there until morning supperless, unless Phyllis surreptitiously conveyed a paper parcel into her window by standing on a stool and using a pitchfork. Once, when overcome with sleep, she fell off the chair and was only saved a hard blow on her head by the open Bible which fell under it. Then Fan interfered, and holding the sobbing child in her arms appealed to her father, asking if so much discipline were necessary.

During the war father had never been quite sure on which side he stood, and now he was equally undecided, until Mrs. Hathern said, in that cool, rasping voice, which always irritated me, “My dear, I am sorry to be the cause of any trouble between you and your daughters, but really you must decide at once which is to take charge of Katy, Miss Fanny or myself. The child is a dear little creature, but needs restraining. Sitting in a chair, or lying in bed, does not hurt her physically. I always corrected Carl that way, and——”

She stopped suddenly as if she had left some name unsaid, and it seemed to me that she flushed a little.

Her hand was on father’s arm rubbing a speck of dirt she saw there, as she waited for his answer.

“Yes, certainly, certainly,” he said, hesitatingly, “Katy is our baby, and I suppose we have spoiled her; naturally it is a mother’s place to take charge of her. Be as easy with her as you can, and you, Katy, be good.”

So Katy was ordered back to the chair until she had committed all the Blesseds which she did not already know in the sermon on the mount. There was only one of these and she was soon at liberty, and as she had the sunniest nature I ever knew she was in a few minutes at her play again under the Elms, making believe she was in church singing the grand old Te Deum with that clear, wonderful voice which made the workmen stop to listen, while Mrs. Hathern said to us, “Miss Errington was right. Katy has great capabilities. I know something of music myself, and when my piano comes I shall take her in hand.”

“May the Lord help Katy if the madam takes her in hand more than she has already done,” Fan said to me when we were alone and she could give vent to her wrath. “I tell you what it is, father is an imbecile and she is a tyrant, and I won’t stand it. I’ll marry Col. Errington. You’ll see.”

Chapter X.—Annie’s Story Continued.
A SUSPICION.

It was five weeks since Mrs. Hathern came home, and late June was queening it over the woods and hills of Lovering, and the lawn and the garden were full of flowers and beauty. The house, with its new coat of paint, was quite another place from the one we had known from childhood. Then it was brown and weather stained; now it was white, with green blinds, and looked very clean and fresh and cool in the summer sunlight, with the luxurious vines clinging to its sides and the huge columns of the piazzas. Inside the change was greater still. Plumbers, painters, upholsterers, carpenters and negroes had departed. The furniture had come and we scarcely knew ourselves with our carpets of Brussels and moquette, our sofas and chairs of brocade and rosewood, our long mirrors and lace draperies, and, more than all, the costly paintings which in their Florentine frames adorned the walls of the drawing room and hall. We were very fine, and our neighbors came in crowds to see and admire and congratulate us upon our prosperity. Mrs. Hathern had plenty of money and spent it lavishly upon us all, and there is no doubt that we were really greatly improved in every way by the introduction of Boston standards and Boston ways. But on Fan’s part and mine there was always a regret for the good old easy-going times when things were at haphazard and we did as we pleased, with no one but Phyllis to dictate to us. She was still doing her duty, but doing it in a cabin across the back yard. The range had come and had been set up, and Mrs. Hathern had done her best to initiate Phyllis into its mysteries. But either she couldn’t or wouldn’t learn, and in despair she had been allowed to carry her pots and kettles and skillets and ovens to the cabin, where there was a fireplace in which she could potter as she pleased, until the arrival of Miss Norah O’Rourke, who understood the range in all its ramifications. She was still visiting her grandmother and resting up, but she was expected in a few days, together with Julina, in whom Fan and I felt considerable interest as the girl who had made love to Carl. He, too, was expected soon and had sent on a box containing a most heterogenous collection, which he had called his Lares and Penates,—fishing tackle, bathing suits, an air-gun, a student’s cap, sporting pictures cut from sporting papers, old books and photographs, and some handkerchiefs and gloves which were never bought for him and in which there still lingered a delicate perfume,—the whole not worth the cost of the express, his mother said.

But she unpacked them carefully and put them in his room, the pleasantest bed-chamber in the house and the one we had always used for guests. This she appropriated without consulting us. Indeed, she had never consulted us but once and that, with regard to the disposition of some of the old furniture, the piano and the pictures of our mother and Katy’s. These last had hung in father’s room, where he could see them the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning, and we had prided ourselves upon them because they were fair likenesses of the sweet-faced women who had once reigned as mistresses at the Elms and because they were our only oils.

“They may be good likenesses, but they are badly done,—mere daubs,” Mrs. Hathern said, when calling our attention to them by asking where we would like to have them put. The space they occupied was wanted for her own portrait, life-size, taken in Paris and gorgeous in cream satin, low neck and pearls. “Three Mrs. Hatherns in one husband’s bed-chamber are too many,” she said, and we agreed with her and removed the daubs to our own room, where we were sitting when Carl’s box was being unpacked.

Katy was looking on and prattling constantly, while her stepmother occasionally reproved her for being so curious and asking so many questions. Something was wanted from below stairs and Mrs. Hathern went to fetch it, leaving Katy alone. A moment after the child came running to us with two photographs which she had found in a book. One, the freshest and newest, was that of a bright, handsome boy of twelve or thirteen, with a happy, laughing expression in his brown eyes which told of a sunny disposition and perfect content with life as he found it. The other was the picture of a boy two or three years older, with something the same features, but a worried, anxious expression as if life were not all a holiday. That they were related we were sure, and that one was a poor relation we felt equally sure.

“Carl,” I said to Fan, indicating the younger face.

“Yes, Carl,” she answered, but her gaze was riveted upon the other,—the sad, browbeaten face,—whose great wide open blue eyes looked into ours with a wistful, pleading expression we had seen somewhere and could not recall. “Who is he, and what makes me feel as if I were looking upon some body dead?” Fan asked just as the soft swish of Mrs. Hathern’s gown was heard and she appeared at the door, saying in the low tone which always made Katy shiver and think of the high chair, “Katy, did you take two photographs from Carl’s room?”

“Yes, mamma. I wanted to show ’em to Fan and Ann,” Katy said, reaching her hand to us for them.

I gave mine up, saying as I did so, “This I am sure is Carl. He is a very handsome boy.”

But Fan kept hers, fascinated by the mournful eyes which held her as the Ancient Mariner held his unwilling hearer.

“Yes, this is Carl, and he is a handsome boy,” Mrs. Hathern replied, taking the photograph from me.

“And who is this?” Fan asked, surrendering hers at last.

I did not think of it then, but it came to me afterwards that Mrs. Hathern’s voice was not quite natural as she replied, “That is Carl’s cousin Paul, who once lived with us.”

“Where is he now?” was Fan’s next question, and Mrs. Hathern replied, “I don’t know. I think he is dead. He went to the war, and never came back.”

She left the room and we were alone, as Katy had already gone. We were sitting near an open window looking north, and simultaneously our eyes went across the field to the hillside cemetery where the headstones of Charlie and The Boy showed white amid the growth of flowering shrubs and fragrant evergreens; then they came back and confronted each other with a questioning look of terror and surprise. Fan was the first to speak. Leaning forward she whispered to me, “Mrs. Hathern is Aunt Martha!”

“Yes,” I said. “She is Aunt Martha,” and I felt myself grow faint and sick as I said it.

We had conceived such a contempt for the woman whose image had haunted our dying boy’s pillow that the shock was very great when we learned that she was with us, a part of us, our father’s wife. We felt more and more sure of it as we recalled the few words The Boy had dropped with regard to himself. When we asked his name he had said he was one of the Apostles, and that was Paul. He had spoken of a Carlyle as younger than himself.

That was Carl, and there seemed nothing wanting to complete the chain of evidence except to know Mrs. Hathern’s real name. From the window we saw father in the lane mounting his horse preparatory to visiting a patient.

Slipping down the back stairs Fan went up to him and after stroking the horse’s neck a moment said, “By the way, father, what is Mrs. Hathern’s real name? You call her Matty. Is it Matilda?” “No, child, Martha. I thought you knew,” was the reply, and in a moment Fan was back again, pirouetting around the room and beating the air as if she were crazy.

“She is Aunt Martha!” she exclaimed. “I don’t wonder he said he would never go back to her. How long do you suppose she kept him sitting in chairs like she does Katy?”

“Until he was glued to them,” I answered, and she continued, “It is horrible, horrible! I think I hate her. What will she say, I wonder, when she knows that Paul died here with us? And she shall know it. Snowdon’s knight never longed more earnestly to stand face to face with Rhoderic Dhu than I long to tell her The Boy’s story.”

Chapter XI.—Annie’s Story Continued.
AUNT MARTHA.

There were two halls on the upper floor of our house, one long and wide and running from north to south, the other, shorter and narrower, turned off at right angles, running east and west. Opening from this hall was Charlie’s room in which no change had been made since The Boy died. Three or four times a year Phyllis washed the linen and made the bed up fresh and clean, while Fan and I swept and dusted the unused chamber, which had become a kind of Bethel to us. If Mrs. Hathern had attacked it during the upheaval we were prepared to do battle. But she did not, and with no suspicion of the danger threatening it we were going down the narrow hall to an outside piazza when we saw the door open and heard voices inside, Mrs. Hathern’s and Phyllis’s, the latter pitched high as if in fierce altercation, and the former low but very determined. Crossing the threshold we found Phyllis, straightened back with her hands on her hips, her usual attitude of defiance, and her turban nearly off her head.

“You can’t have dis yer room,” she was saying. “It’s Mas’r Charlie’s, and whar the Boy died; dems de berry piller slips he died on; nobody has done slep here since and neber will till de day of judgment. Thar’s ’nuff oder rooms plenty good for July or any other white truck from de norf.”

“What is all this?” Fanny asked, addressing Mrs. Hathern, who replied, “I am glad you have come to teach this insolent negro her place. I am not accustomed to such opposition from a servant, and cannot allow it. I am wanting a room for Julina, who will be here in a few days. This suits me. But when I told Phyllis to clear it up and remove those old soldier clothes, which are only gathering moths, she refused outright and commenced a rigmarole about Mas’r Charlie and some Boy which I cannot comprehend. Perhaps you can enlighten me.”

Turning to Phyllis Fan said, “You can go. I will explain to Mrs. Hathern.” Then to the latter, “I am sorry that Phyllis should be disrespectful to you, but she is right about the room. No one can occupy it. It was my brother Charlie’s and the Boy’s, whose memory is almost as dear to us as my brother’s. These which you call old clothes were Charlie’s. You know, perhaps, that he was killed in the war.”

She had crossed the room and was standing by the uniforms of blue and grey, one with the stars and bars above it, the other with the stars and stripes. Mrs. Hathern bowed stiffly and said, “I have heard so, yes; but if he was a confederate how did he happen to wear the blue, too? Did he turn traitor to his cause?”

Her manner was exasperating, and her words insulting, and I knew by the fire in Fan’s eyes that she would spare no detail in the story she meant to tell.

“Traitor! Never!” she answered, hotly. “The blue belonged to the Boy.”

“And who was he? the Boy is so very indefinite,” Mrs. Hathern asked in the same offensive tone, which made Fan furious.

“I don’t know who he was; not even his name. Let me tell you how he came to us, blood-stained and worn and frightened, and how we cared for him till he died, and then you will know why this room is doubly sacred to us,” Fan said.

“Certainly, if you like; it must be interesting; but please be brief as possible, as I am in a hurry,” was Mrs. Hathern’s provoking remark, and seating herself upon the bed, she prepared to listen, with a bored expression upon her face.

Fan’s blood was up, and the sight of the woman whom she believed to be Aunt Martha sitting so serene and unconcerned on the bed, where thoughts of her had terrorized the dying boy, roused her beyond quiet endurance.

“Mrs. Hathern,” she said, “please do not sit there. It hurts me as much as if you were sitting on the Boy’s grave.”

Mrs. Hathern smiled derisively. “I am very comfortable and not at all superstitious. So I think I’ll stay, as I am rather tired. I shall not hurt your Boy,” she said, putting the pillow under her head and leaning back against the headboard.

I wish I could paint a picture of Fan’s white face and dark gleaming eyes, as in words more eloquent than I can write she told the story of the Boy, beginning at Fredericksburg and coming down to the day when he came to Phyllis’s cabin, bedraggled and worn, with a hunted look in his eyes and pathetic entreaty in his voice as he begged us sometimes not to let the soldiers get him, and again not to let his Aunt Martha know where he was, as he could not go back to her. Fan had taken the boy’s letter from the blue coat pocket where it was kept and had read it, while Mrs. Hathern’s face softened as I did not suppose it could soften, and there was something like moisture in her eyes. But she kept her place upon the bed until Fan told of the few hints the boy had given of his antecedents.

“In his delirium,” she said, “he talked of Carlyle, who, I think, was his cousin,—of a dog whose name was Don,—and of an Aunt Martha, who could not have been kind to him, he seemed so afraid of her and so anxious that she should not know where he was. If you could have seen his poor wasted face and sunken eyes upon the pillow on which you are lying, you would know why this room is like a grave and why we cannot let a stranger occupy it.”

At the mention of the wasted face and sunken eyes which had lain upon the pillow Mrs. Hathern started as if she had been stung, or had felt the cold touch of the dead face Fan described so vividly. Crossing the room she put one hand caressingly upon the blue coat, and wiping the tears from her eyes with the other she said, “I thank you for your kindness to the northern boy, and shall not forget it. Did you never learn his name?”

“Never,” Fan replied. “We asked him what it was, and he said he was one of the Apostles. That is all we know for sure. We advertised and wrote to the town in Maine which he mentioned in his delirium, but nothing definite could be learned except that a strange boy calling himself Joseph Wilde had enlisted in that place early in the war and had not been heard of since. Charlie called him the Boy. We have called him the Boy ever since, and it is so engraved upon his tombstone. After he died Phyllis and I cut two or three curls from his head for his friends, if we ever found them, and I put them in Charlie’s letter. He had soft brown hair, with a reddish tinge in some lights, and it had grown very long for a boy. See——?” and she held up the rings of hair which twined around and clung to her fingers.

“Yes, I see,” Mrs. Hathern said in a trembling voice, and I fancied that she recoiled from the hair as if it had been a living thing confronting her with reproaches. “I understand now your feelings with regard to this room and respect them. It shall not be disturbed. I can find another for Julina,” she continued; “and now, if you will excuse me, I will go. I think I hear your father.”

She was herself again, cold, dignified and stiff, but gave no sign that she was the Aunt Martha we had been anxious to find. We were sure of it, however, and if anything had been wanting to confirm us in our suspicions we had it the next morning, which was Sunday. As was our custom on that day we went after breakfast with flowers to the cemetery, and found a small bouquet on Charlie’s grave, and on the boy’s a larger one, while the grass which was long had been trampled down by some one kneeling or sitting upon it.

“Aunt Martha has been here,” Fan said. “I really think she has something human about her after all, but I should like her better if she’d say square out ‘I am Aunt Martha.’ I hate concealments.”

On our return to the house we passed the cabin where Phyllis sat on a wash-bench in the shade, shelling peas for dinner.

“Mrs. Hathern done got ahead of you,” she said, running her hands through the peas and letting them drop back into the pan. “She was out before sun up, pickin’ de flowers, and went holdin’ her white petticoats mos’ up to her knees cross de lot to de cemetry, whar she went down face fo’most on de Boy’s grave, an’ when she coined back her eyes was all red and watery. Like ’nuff she’s some of his kin.”

It was scarcely possible that Phyllis suspected anything. If she did, she kept it to herself. Neither did Mrs. Hathern give any sign that she knew aught of the boy, whom, to each other, we began to speak of as Paul, while she was always Aunt Martha.

Chapter XII.—Annie’s Story Continued.
NORAH O’ROURKE AND JULINA.

A suitable room had been found for Julina very near Norah O’Rourke’s, and we were anxiously awaiting their arrival, when one evening as we sat at the tea-table the village ‘bus drove into the yard, loaded on the top with baggage and filled inside, it seemed to me, with big hats and feathers and ribbons. Nothing doubting that we were about to be favored with some of Mrs. Hathern’s grand Boston friends I was wondering if Phyllis would be equal to the emergency and lamenting that Norah O’Rourke and Julina were not at their posts, when Mrs. Hathern sprang up, exclaiming, as she started from the room, “Norah and Julina.” Father was not at home, and in his absence Phyllis, who was waiting on the table, felt at liberty to express herself with comparative freedom.

“Oh, my Lord! I s’posed in course ’twas some quality. Look-a-dar, will you?” she said, as she nodded her high turban at the scene transpiring outside.

Norah O’Rourke, gorgeous in purple traveling dress, and big brown hat trimmed with green ribbons and feathers, had alighted, and Mrs. Hathern, who had never shown herself at all demonstrative, was kissing her, as she told her how glad she was to see her.

“My Lord, my Lord, that I should live to see Mas’r Hathern’s wife kiss a white nigger! What will de wah fotch us next!” Phyllis exclaimed, and setting down the teapot, from which she was filling my cup, she disappeared in the direction of her cabin, out of sight of what she considered a familiarity beneath the dignity of Mas’r Hathern’s family.

Full of curiosity Fan and I watched the group with open-eyed wonder, deciding that Norah O’Rourke was rather a formidable personage, of whom we might stand in awe, and that Julina was airy and pert, but very graceful, and dressed in much better taste than her companion. Brought up as we had been among the negroes, we had never seen a white servant in our lives and knew nothing of the relation they held to their employers. That they were more than slaves and less than equals we supposed, but we were not prepared for the familiarity with which Mrs. Hathern greeted Norah and Julina. She did not kiss the latter, but she kept hold of her hand as she conducted them into the house and up to their rooms, while Norah, in her rich Irish brogue, declared Virginia the most god-forsaken country she was ever in, and Richmond the most tumble-down hole, and herself played out generally with her long journey in cars which Boston wouldn’t put cattle in.

That night they took their supper in the dining-room and Mrs. Hathern waited upon them, while Phyllis nursed her wrath in her kitchen under the dogwood trees, where later on I found a great many cooking utensils thrown around promiscuously,—flatirons, gourds, tin dippers, and brooms,—a sure sign of the tempest which had been raging in the old negress’s breast. At that time my sympathies were all with Phyllis, but in the light of later experience I came to see how unreasonable she was in her prejudice against both Norah and Julina, who were fair representatives of their class and who could no more understand the servility of a born slave like Phyllis than she could understand their assumption of equality with those they served. For some weeks I detested Norah for her unmistakable air of good-as-you. Then I began to like her so much that if she had gone away and returned to us I think I might have kissed her without any hesitancy. She had been recommended to Mrs. Hathern as honest and trusty and neat and a good cook, with a temper of her own and a strong disposition to rule the house, all of which recommendations proved true. She was most trusty and honest and a grand cook, with a temper as recommended, and she did rule the house, and ruled it so well and allowed so many privileges that Mrs. Hathern submitted to the bondage, and by making everything subservient to her wishes and raising her wages at intervals she had managed to keep her so long that she had become a part of herself and her ways, as Phyllis was a part of ourselves and our ways. I never knew before I met Norah O’Rourke that there could be so much expressed in the creak of a shoe! Hers always creaked,—sometimes more, sometimes less,—and after a little I could tell by the sound exactly the mood she was in. If her foot came down heavy and strong, even Mrs. Hathern avoided her; if the tread was medium she ventured to issue her orders; but when she had on her felt slippers, as we designated her softest tread, she was like clay in our hands, to be moulded at our will. We all stood a little in fear of her, and father said, laughingly, that he did not dare go into the kitchen without knocking for permission, if her shoes were noisy. Between her and Phyllis there was war from the first, and the two were only restrained from open battles by being kept apart as much as possible,—Phyllis on her premises under the dogwoods, where she washed and ironed and bemoaned the change which had come over her master’s family, and Norah in her domain, where she concocted and served the most wonderful dishes with the skill of a trained chef.

Once Fan ventured to remonstrate with her for her antagonism to Phyllis, whose many virtues she set forth in glowing colors. Norah’s shoes creaked ominously as she stamped around the kitchen, while her Irish dialect, which she never used unless she was excited, came in full play.

“An’ sure,” she said, “you don’t know what ye’s talkin’ about. When I’m riled, as I am a good part of the time in this haythenish counthry, I’m spilin’ for a fight, and if I didn’t pitch into that nagur, I should wallop you all with my shillalah of a tongue.”

After this we let matters take their course, trying occasionally to smooth Phyllis down, when her plumage was more than usually ruffled. If she was to be credited, she rassled a good deal in prar for grace to do her duty and not run away.

“Niggers and Irish wouldn’t mix more’n ile and water,” she said, and of the two she detested July more than she did Rory O’Rock, the name she gave to Norah. “Such a’rs,” she said, “axin me to call her Juleen ’case thar’s a French axum over her eye. What’s dat ar, I’d like to know. I can’t see nothin’ over her eyes but dem great shaggy brush heaps. Juleen, indeed! I shall call her July, with her black eyes and bar and face, too. ’Spec she’s some nigger blood in her.”

Julina’s father was plain Tom Smith, of Vermont, but her mother was French, and from her the girl had inherited many of the characteristics of the race. She was very slight and would have been very pretty but for her large teeth, over which her thin lips never quite closed. Dark-eyed, dark-haired and dark-faced, with a certain airy grace of speech and manner she looked the French maid fully, especially in the little caps which she wore so jauntily, but wore unwillingly. They were badges of servitude, she said, and nothing would induce her to wear them if Mrs. Hathern did not pay her extra for it. At heart she was a born anarchist, and although she performed her duties as housemaid thoroughly she hated them, and let Fan and me know that she did, talking sometimes in English and sometimes in French, which she had learned from her mother, and hurled with great volubility at both Norah and Phyllis when engaged in a spirited encounter.

She made no secret to us of her dislike of Mrs. Hathern, but she adored Carl, and her eyes lighted up with a strange brilliancy when she spoke of him. He was expected very soon and no one seemed more anxious for his coming than Julina, although she took good care not to express herself in the presence of his mother. Before her she was always respectful and modest and quiet, but to us she showed herself as she really was, and talked freely of what she meant to be,—“not a drudge to go and come at another’s bidding, but a lady, to be served as we were served.” She had it in her, if her father was a poor farmer in Vermont. She had a good common-school education. She had tact and common sense. Her mother’s family were somebody in France, where she meant to go when she had sufficient money, and then we’d see what she could do.

Chapter XIII.—Annie’s Story Continued.
CARL.

Notwithstanding what he had said of his anxiety to reach the Elms, he did not seem to be in a great hurry to do so. He stopped some days in New York, and again in Washington, and it was two weeks from the time he left Boston before a telegram came to his mother saying he was in Richmond and would be with us the next evening. That same day Fan had a letter from Jack, who wrote: “I was the first to make the acquaintance of Mrs. Hathern, and am also the first to know her son Carl. He has been at the Spotswood four days, and I verily believe knows more of the city than I do. He has been everywhere and seen everything, from Libby Prison, Castle Thunder and Belle Isle to the fortifications in the country for miles around. He has the most expensive room in the hotel, and drives out with a span and a guide and coachman, and myself, whenever I can find time to go out with him. He has visited the State House and every store and shop and office in town, and talked politics and reconstruction with as much assurance as if he were a gray-haired veteran of fifty instead of a boy of fifteen or sixteen. Everybody knows him and everybody likes him, especially at the hotel, where he spends his money so freely. I usually go there every night and look over the register to see the new arrivals, and when I saw ‘Carlyle Haverleigh, Boston, Mass.,’ I soon had him by the hand, telling him who I was and asking what I could do for him. Do for him! Bless your soul, he does not need anyone to do for him; he is equal to anything; takes care of and patronizes me; owns the whole south generally, and Richmond and the Spotswood in particular. And yet he is not in the least offensive in his patronage. It is just his pleasant, genial, helpful way, which goes to your heart directly. We call him Boston, and laugh at his ‘I guesses’ and ‘carnts’ and ‘sharnts,’ and tell him he ought to be kept under a glass cover, with his fine clothes and white hands. But he takes it in perfect good humor and ridicules our ‘I reckons’ and ‘heaps’ and ‘right smarts,’ and says we wear baggy, ill-made clothes, and talk through our noses worse than any down-east Yankee he ever met, but admits that we are a pretty good sort, on the whole, for rebs, and much better, he presumes, for having been licked! Think of it! A Boston cub, right from the very heart of abolitionism and everything else, talking like that to old Virginia soldiers, who shake their sides over him. Truly the world moves, and we move with it, and I am glad we do. I like the boy, or, perhaps, I should say young man, for he is nearly as tall as I am, and straight as an Indian, with a proud bearing as if the world were made for him. He has a frank, ingenuous face, with clear-cut features, laughing eyes, and a mouth which, if it were a girl’s, would not be bad to kiss! I rather think it is a kissing mouth, he is so fond of the girls,—talks to everyone he meets in the hotel, and actually asked Mrs. Gen. Sands’ daughter Mabel, from South Carolina, to take a walk with him. She took it and a blowing up, too, from her mother, when she got home, while he took a worse one for his presumption,—I’m not sure she didn’t call it impudence,—in proposing such a thing to a southern girl and a stranger. You should have seen Carl then. I was really proud of him, he stood up so manly and dignified in the parlor half full of people and said, ‘I beg your pardon, madam; I meant no harm, I assure you. It was because she was a southern girl that I asked her. I wanted to see if she were like Boston girls; she is very much like them, except, perhaps, more charming, because not quite so stiff. I really did not intend to be impudent. I couldn’t, you know. Why, I’m a Bostonian, a Haverleigh, and a gentleman!’

“We all wanted to cheer, and Mrs. Sands most of all. She has been out driving with him since and taken Mabel with her. What strikes me as very remarkable about the boy is his freedom from all bad habits. I don’t believe he has one, unless it is a disposition to spend his money too freely. He says he owes everything to his mother. There was some bad blood in the family away back somewhere, and she was as afraid of it as of a mad dog and watched him as a rat would watch a mouse. When he was ten years old some college chaps got him to drink and smoke until he was so deathly sick that they feared he would die. When he got over it his mother thrashed him so soundly with a rawhide that he declares he has a mark of one of the welts on his back yet. Then she told him that for every year until he was twenty-one in which he neither drank, nor smoked, nor chewed, nor swore, nor lied, she would give him one hundred dollars over and above the allowance she usually made him. She wanted to tack on dancing and theatres, he said, but he kicked at that and promised the rest, and kept his promise, too, until last year, when he called a girl who lived with them a d—— fool because she would make eyes at him. Quite to his surprise his mother gave him fifty dollars, saying it was only half a swear and the girl deserved it.

“His father left a large fortune, the use of which is to be his mother’s during her lifetime, with the exception of twenty-five thousand dollars which are to be paid to Carl when he is twenty-one. At his mother’s death he gets the whole. So, you see, he will some day be a very rich man and a great catch. Pity he wasn’t older, or you and Annie younger. He has asked me a great many questions about you; says he always wanted some sisters, and knows he shall like you,—love, I think he said, but he is only a boy and I am not jealous. He leaves day after to-morrow and I shall miss him, for I find myself looking forward to the close of business hours when I am free to join him and hear his funny and original remarks about us and our ways which he says are a hundred years behind Boston.”

This letter did not in the least diminish our desire to see Carl Haverleigh, in whose coming the whole household was interested. We were running like clockwork now, with Phyllis as laundress, Norah as cook, Julina as housemaid, and Boston baked beans and brown bread on Sunday. We dressed for dinner and dined in courses at six, while father wore his swallow-tail and Julina waited upon us in her pretty white apron and cap. Mrs. Hathern’s carriage and horses had come from Boston. We had a colored coachman from Richmond, who wore a tall hat and brass buttons and went to sleep on the box while driving us around the neighborhood. Altogether, we were very high-toned and Bostony, and but for a few drawbacks might have enjoyed the new order of things immensely. Our house was handsomely furnished; father’s debts were paid, and had he chosen he might have dismissed his patients and lived a life of perfect ease. Mrs. Hathern was very free with her money, and more generous to Fan and me than we expected or deserved. But there was always a feeling of restraint in her presence and a hankering for the flesh-pots of Egypt, when it didn’t matter whether things were in order or not, or we on time to a minute; and then there was unfortunate Katy, who not only spent hours in the high chair and in bed for trivial things we had never dreamed of calling faults, but to whose other trials was added that of daily music lessons. Mrs. Hathern’s piano, a splendid Steinway, had come, and the old one which had been our mother’s was moved to make room for it. Then, following Miss Errington’s advice, she commenced teaching Katy, who was required to practice every day until her little arms and hands ached with fatigue. She hated the practice, but liked the singing, and every morning for half an hour or more the house was filled with melody as she went up and down the scales, clear and sweet as a bird, while I listened with pride and Fan with fear of what might be the result in the future.

There was to be a cessation of the lessons for a few days on account of Carl’s arrival and because of a grand picnic which was to be held in the woods near a little waterfall and a fine bit of scenery. Everybody in town who was anybody was going, and Mrs. Hathern was especially glad that it was fixed for the day after Carl’s expected arrival, as it would give her an early opportunity to show her handsome and accomplished son to her friends and neighbors. I think the New Englander revels in picnics. Mrs. Hathern was certainly in her element preparing for this one and for Carl, who was coming at last.

It was a lovely July day,—cool for the season, but with that deliciousness in the air and deep blue in the sky common to Virginia summers. Carl’s room was in readiness for him. Julina had swept and dusted and lingered over it longer than was at all necessary, and there was a light in the girl’s eyes and an airiness in her movements which irritated and disgusted us. Mrs. Hathern had hung upon the walls a few pictures we had not seen before, some of them exquisitely colored photographs of Venice and others, copies of Pompeiian dancing girls, who, it seemed to me, might have worn thicker garments and not have been uncomfortable even in the summer. But I was not up in high art and had not spent a year and a half abroad, like Mrs. Hathern, who could contemplate and discuss a Venus de Medicis or Apollo Belvidere as readily as a block of unhewn marble. There was a head of a Madonna, which Mrs. Hathern had found in Florence, in Carl’s room, and Norah hung around its neck a string of beads from Lourdes which had been blessed by the Pope; “not for keeps,” she said, “but just for a little while to show him I am glad he is coming.” Phyllis, too, had brought the only valuable article she possessed,—a handsome bowl of Royal Worcester, which a Federal soldier had given her in exchange for a peck of apples and some walnuts. It was stolen, of course, from some desecrated home, but as Phyllis didn’t know where that home was she had no compunctions in taking it, and since the war it had stood on a little table at the head of the bed with her pipes and tobacco and child’s first reader which she kept there, not because she could read,—we had tried to teach her and failed,—but because it looked as if she could. She had heard us talk so much of Carl that she was interested, too, and brought the bowl full of flowers and set it down by his photograph on the bureau.

The morning was long and the evening was longer, but five o’clock came at last and the carriage with Mrs. Hathern and father and Katy went to the station, while Fan and I waited at home upon the piazza, and Julina went once or twice to the gate and looked anxiously down the street. Suddenly there was the sound of rapid footsteps and of some one whistling Dixie at the rear of the hall, and in a moment Carl stood before us, flushed and expectant and eager. The train, which was usually late, had been ahead of time and pulled up at the station before the carriage reached it, for something had happened to the harness and detained it. Everybody knew Carl was coming, and everyone at the station knew it was he as he leaped upon the platform in his long linen duster and straw hat and northern air generally.

“Halloo! Is there anyone here from the Hatherns? I am Carl Haverleigh,” was his salutation to the station master, who replied that there was not yet, but undoubtedly would be soon.

“Well, is there a short cut to the house which I can take and surprise them?” he asked next.

There was one and Carl took it and brought up by Phyllis’s cabin, where she sat quietly smoking under the dogwood tree after her work was done. Jack had described us all so minutely that Carl knew in a moment who Phyllis was, and his cheery “Halloo, Aunt Phyllis. How d’ye,” nearly threw the old woman off her seat. She did drop her clay pipe, and Carl’s brown head and her red turban knocked together as both stooped to pick it up.

“God bless you, Mas’r Carl! I’se jes tolable, thank ye. How d’ye you ’self?” she said, taking her pipe from him and holding his hand, white as a girl’s, in both her black horny ones.

“Where are the folks?” he asked, and she replied, “Ole Mas’r and Missus and Katy has done gone for you, but you’ll find de young ladies in the piazza waitin’ for you. We’s all right glad to see you, Mas’r Carl. Go right up de path dar.”

Following her directions he came next to the kitchen, where Norah stopped her preparations for dinner to greet him, while Julina darted out from some corner and seized him by the hand, her black eyes full of the delight she felt. But there was no answering gleam in his, and his “How are you, Julina?” was cold and formal as he hurried on to where we were sitting. Jack had written “He is nearly as tall as I am,” but in his long duster he looked taller, and there was such an air of fashion and maturity about him that for a moment we felt abashed as if in the presence of a full-grown young man of a different type from any we had known. This feeling, however, soon passed, for no one could withstand the cordiality of his manner, or the expression of his frank, handsome face.

“Halloo,” he cried, “here you are, Fan-and-Ann, and I am Carl.”

He kissed us and whirled us round and told us he was first rate, before we could say a word to him. Then, holding each of us by the hand, he looked us over curiously and critically.

“You look just as I thought you did. The rest of the folks have gone for me, I suppose,” he said, releasing our hands, and beginning to remove his duster, “Won’t mother scold though because I gave her the slip. Hallo, there they are;” and he darted down the steps to meet the carriage just entering the yard.

There was a slight cloud on Mrs. Hathern’s face as she alighted and asked why he did not wait for them.

“Oh, I couldn’t. I was in such a hurry to see my sisters, and here’s another one,” he said, lifting Katy in his arms and squeezing her until she was red in the face.

“You are a beauty, and no mistake!” he said, putting her down and turning to father, towards whom his manner was exceedingly polite and deferential.

It was strange what a change his coming made in our home. He was so bright and thoughtful and magnetic that before the evening was over we felt that we had known him years instead of hours. Jack was a gentleman, and so were all our male acquaintances, while Col. Errington represented the highest phase of polish we had ever seen. But Carl was different from them all, with a difference we felt but could not well define. He seemed to know the right thing to say and when to say it and how to bring out the best there was in one. I had never been as well satisfied with myself as I was after that first evening spent with him, his flatteries and compliments were so delicate and seemed so earnest. Fan thought him not altogether genuine and a little too familiar.

“He is too tall to be putting his arm around us so much,” she said when we were discussing him in the privacy of our room. “I call him a flirt, and if there was nothing to keep us in mind, he’d forget us in a week,—but, on the whole, I like him.”

Chapter XIV.—Annie’s Story Continued.
THE PICNIC.

The picnic grounds were seven or eight miles distant, and we were to start as early as possible so as to avoid the heat of midday. Mrs. Hathern, whose ambition was to excel in everything, had made great preparations for an elaborate lunch, which was to be served by Phyllis and Julina.

Fan said she must have slept in her bonnet, as we found her with it on when we went down to breakfast. Katy was also ready, and so wild with excitement and anticipation that she scarcely heard Mrs. Hathern’s oft repeated warning not to soil her clothes unless she wished to stay at home. She wanted to show Carl her kittens and puppies and chickens, and finally took him down to feed the ducks in a little artificial pond or basin by the side of the lane, where they were assembled in full force, their quacks growing louder and louder when they saw the little girl approaching and knew by instinct that she was coming to feed them. It was great fun throwing them crumbs of bread and watching them as they swam after and fought over them and then craned up their necks for more. For a time everything went well and Katy’s white dress was without spot or blemish, although her boots showed marks of the soft soil around the basin. Then suddenly, neither she nor Carl knew how, she slipped and fell in the worst possible place. Her boots and stockings and dress were covered with mud, spatters of which were on her sash and face and hands, so that it was a most forlorn-looking child who came to us, crying bitterly as she held up first one foot and then the other and showed us her muddy hands.

“I am so sorry! Oh, what will mamma say? and can’t I go?” was the burden of her cry as we began to wash off the dirt and tried to comfort her.

At that moment Mrs. Hathern, who had heard of Katy’s mishap from Carl, appeared in the doorway, her face a thunder cloud and her voice trembling with anger as she said, “You naughty, disobedient child! Why did you go to the duck pond at all? You know what I told you, and I mean it, too. I shall send for Julina at once and put you to bed where you will stay while we are gone.”

“Oh, mamma, mamma; please don’t make me stay at home. I want to go so much. I didn’t think the bank was so soft, and I wanted to show the big duck to Carl,” was Katy’s despairing cry, as she stretched her little hands imploringly toward her stepmother.

But she might as well have pleaded with a rock. Things generally had gone wrong in the household that morning. Father had been called to an old patient who lived miles away and was dangerously ill. Consequently, he could not go with us unless we waited for him an indefinite length of time. Phyllis had scorched one of the finest table-cloths. Something ailed the range, and Norah’s corn cakes were spoiled in the baking, thereby putting her in a state where collision, or even conversation, with her was not desirable. In looking about Carl’s room to see if everything was in order, Mrs. Hathern had come across a photograph which Julina had put behind some books where Carl would be sure to find it if he ever took up one to read. The girl’s admiration of her handsome son was not unknown to Mrs. Hathern, who heretofore had thought but little of it; but this was going too far, and taking the picture to Julina she tore it into shreds, asking what she meant by such presumption, and threatening her with instant dismissal if anything of the sort occurred again. It was in vain that Julina protested that she only wanted to put something in Carl’s room as all the rest had done,—that she meant nothing wrong. Mrs. Hathern heard her with scorn, and was so scathing and bitter that Julina declared her intention of giving up her place and going home at once. This Mrs. Hathern could not allow. It was well enough for her to threaten dismissal, but for Julina to forestall her by going voluntarily was another thing. She was too well trained and too useful to be given up lightly, and some concession had to be made before matters were adjusted. Following this came the news that Katy had fallen into the duck pond, and this was a straw too much. She could conciliate Julina, because it was for her interest to do so, but towards Katy she was inexorable, notwithstanding that Fan and I pleaded that for this once she might be forgiven.

“Beat her, if you will, but let her go,” Fan said. “Think what you are condemning her to,—a long day in bed, while we are enjoying ourselves; and she has anticipated it so much. Father would not allow it if he were here.”

“I am very glad then that he is away, as I should be sorry to have any serious disagreement with him on the subject of family discipline,” Mrs. Hathern replied, in that tone which always made us so angry.

With a slight inclination of her head she left the room, and the rattle of her stiff skirts as she swept down the stairs reminded us of Norah’s shoes when she was in a tantrum. In a few minutes Julina came in, sullen and red-eyed, and began to remove Katy’s soiled clothes, while the little girl cried bitterly with long-drawn, gasping sobs, hard for us to bear and know that we were powerless to help her. What Julina thought we could not guess. Her movements were rather jerky and spiteful as she undressed the child and put her in the little cot, which stood in one corner of our room. Katy’s tears, however, must have moved her, for, as she drew the sheet up round her, she said, “It’s awful mean, but I wouldn’t let her know I cared. Norah will come and sit with you and bring you some raspberry tarts.”

Then she turned to leave the room, but stopped on the threshold as if a new idea had suddenly occurred to her.

“Katy,” she said, going back to the cot, “I believe you’ll go yet. I am going to tell Carl.”

She found him in the side piazza playing with the kittens, and without softening the matter at all she acquainted him with the facts.

“Where’s mother?” Carl asked, and there was a look on his face like his mother as he started in quest of her.

She had come up to his room where he found her and as ours was directly opposite and the doors were open we could not help hearing most of the conversation.

“Mother,” he began, in a voice I would never have recognized as Carl’s, “what is this about Katy’s being kept at home and sent to bed because of an accident?”

“I suppose the young ladies have been complaining to you,” Mrs. Hathern said, and Carl replied, “I have not seen them since I came from the duck pond, but I know about Katy, and it’s a burning shame to treat a little child like that. I remember the hours,—yes, weeks, if all the time were added up,—that Paul and I were kept in bed or on chairs for trivial offenses. It’s worse than beating, for that is soon over and done with; Paul said so the time you thrashed him for nothing.”

“Why do you bring up Paul so often?” Mrs. Hathern asked, with what seemed a tremor in her voice.

“I don’t know, unless it is that he has been in my mind all the morning, and I keep wondering if he were in this part of the country,” Carl said, his voice softening as he spoke of Paul, but hardening again as he continued, “Don’t make Katy run away as Paul did. She was no more to blame for falling into the mud than I was, nor as much, and by George if she stays home I shall stay, too, and go to bed; or, no, I’ll sit up and amuse her.”

Here was a family jar in earnest, and we were thinking of closing our door so as not to hear any more, when Mrs. Hathern and Carl must have changed their positions or spoken lower, as we distinguished nothing more, except disjointed sentences, such as for this once, and somebody’s sake—Carl’s, or Paul’s presumably. Then the former crossed the hall quickly and knocked at our door.

“Hop up, Katy!” he exclaimed, walking up to the cot where Katy had raised herself on her elbow at the sound of his voice. “You are going, if you’ll promise never to fall into a frog pond again when you have on your best clothes. Hurry! the carriage will be round in fifteen minutes. Here are your shoes; but where the deuce are your stockings?”

Katy was on the floor by this time and we were all helping her dress, Carl the coolest of the three and showing a deftness and knowledge of straps and buttons and hooks not common in a boy. She was ready in ten minutes, her face a little flushed and stained with tears, but shining with the light of a great and sudden joy, and as the last pin was put in its place she threw her arms around Carl’s neck and laying her cheek against his, said to him, “Oh, Carl, I love you so much, and shall love you forever and ever because you are so good.”

“Perhaps you’d better say something handsome to mother for letting you go,” Carl said, adding hastily, as he saw Katy’s look of perplexity and heard his mother on the stairs: “Tell her she’s an angel, or a brick, or an old darling, or something of that sort.”

Usually Katy would have known what to say without prompting, but in her excitement she seemed to have lost her wits, and running up to Mrs. Hathern she exclaimed, “I thank you so much, and you are an old darling, and an old angel and an old brick; Carl said so, didn’t you, Carl?”

It would be difficult to describe the expression of Mrs. Hathern’s face as she looked at her son, who, she knew was responsible for this doubtful compliment, and who laughed so long and loud that Fan and I laughed with him.

“I think you might refrain from teaching Katy slang,” she said, with a smile she could not repress.

With harmony thus restored we seated ourselves in the carriage and were driven along the pleasant road and through the shady woods to the picnic grounds, where most of our friends were already assembled and where Mrs. Hathern’s good humor soon came back to her with the attention she received. No one’s lunch was as elaborate as ours, or as daintily served, for both Phyllis and Julina did their best. Julina’s face was clouded and scowling, but she moved with a certain airiness and grace natural to her, and spoke, when she did speak, in the language of a lady rather than of a servant. Hitherto she had only been seen by our neighbors when they called and she let them in, but now she was prominent everywhere and knew she was attracting attention, and her black eyes shone and flashed, and her color came and went until I began to think her positively pretty, and said so to Fan, who was also watching her.

“Dangerous,” was her reply, while Carl, who was standing near and heard her, added, “Has Satan in her as big as a barn, and intrigue enough to overthrow an empire. Thinks herself the equal of anybody and means to prove it some day, and, by George, I believe she will. I hope I shan’t be one of her victims.”

This scarcely seemed possible, but there swept over me suddenly a most unaccountable feeling that in some way that dark, slim girl with the French blood in her veins and the fierce ambition in her heart, might be a blot on the life of the handsome boy, who was the lion of the picnic as his mother was the queen. I had never seen her as gracious as she was that day when she moved among the people as if she had been the hostess instead of one of them. I think it was Carl’s presence which made her so different from the cold, precise woman we knew at home. She was very proud of him and of the attention he received. Everybody wished to know him and he wanted to know everybody, and before the day was over had said so many pleasant things and done so many little courteous acts to both old and young that we were congratulated on all sides for our good fortune in possessing so delightful a step-brother. Carl was a success.

Chapter XV.—Annie’s Story Continued.
PAUL.

The next day was Sunday, and after our one o’clock dinner Fan and I started for the cemetery on the hillside, accompanied by Carl. We had omitted taking flowers early in the morning, but we had them with us now, and Carl carried them for us and asked many questions about our brother as we went slowly across the fields.

“Shot at Fredericksburg,” he said. “That’s where a cousin of mine was killed, if he were killed at all. We tracked him to that battle, or thought we did, and have never heard of him since.”

Neither Fan nor I made any reply, and he went on: “He was several years older than I, but too young to go to the war. He lived with us and I loved him like a brother, and when I really made up my mind that he was dead I cried myself sick, and now I am sometimes so lonesome for Paul that I want to cry just as I did then. It is hard to believe he is dead, with no proof of it, and every night I pray that he may come back to us, or that we may know for sure what became of him. You pray, don’t you? I heard Annie in church this morning, but not a peep from you. I don’t believe you said the creed.”

He was speaking to Fan, who answered rather shortly, “I prayed so much for the success of the south during the war, and we failed so utterly that I have about lost faith in prayer, and have come to think that what is to be will be, and we can’t help ourselves; so what is the use of praying? Didn’t the north pray with all their might that their army might be victors, and didn’t we do the same, and wern’t we just as much in earnest as you were, and which did the Lord hear?”

“Our side, of course, because we were right, and had the most men and money. You shouldn’t have been a Reb if you wanted the Lord to hear you. What could you do against the Lord and such hordes as we had to fight you with?” Carl said, while Fan tossed her head high in the air, but did not continue the conversation.

We were in the enclosure now under the pine trees and were laying the flowers we had brought upon the four graves, our mother’s, Katy’s mother’s, Charlie’s and The Boy’s. Carl was reading the inscriptions on the tombstones, first mother’s, then Katy’s mother’s, then Charlie’s, over which he lingered. “Only nineteen; he would be twenty-three now, that’s a little older than Paul, if he were living. Halloo! what does this mean, ‘The Boy, who died Good Friday, 1863.’ That’s a queer inscription. Who was The Boy?”

“We don’t know,” Fan said, sitting down on an iron chair near the grave and clasping her hands at the back of her head.

Carl looked at her mystified and curious.

“He was one of your people,” she continued, “and I hated you all, until he came to us and died, with his hand in mine, hurrahing for me. I haven’t hated anybody since. Would you like to hear his story?”

“Yes,” Carl said, and leaning upon the stone he listened while Fan told the story in all its details as only she could tell it.

At its close Carl was down upon the grassy mound, crushing the flowers we had put there, and sobbing bitterly, “Paul, Paul,—it was Paul! I have found him at last dead, and I had hoped he might come back to me alive. Oh, Paul, I am so sorry for everything.”

We were all crying now, and surely over no soldier’s grave, north or south, east or west, was sadder moan ever made than over that of The Boy that summer afternoon years and years ago. Whatever of wrong there had been in Carl’s treatment of Paul it was atoned for, if tears can atone for a wrong done to the dead. I had never seen a man or boy cry as Carl cried, with his face upon the grass.

“Don’t,” Fan said at last. “Don’t you remember that he bade us tell you he liked you?”

“Yes, I know, and it’s that which hurts, and the knowing for sure that he is dead,” Carl answered, lifting up his head and wiping away his tears. “I have dreamed so often that he came back that I have almost made myself believe that he would, and I have planned so many things to do when he came. Strange, too, that he has been so often in my mind since I came here. You told me that your woods were often full of Federal troops, and many times at the picnic I was saying to myself, ‘Was Paul ever here? Did he see this waterfall, or sleep under that big tree near which they said camp fires were built?’ and now I am by his grave, and you cared for him when he died. Tell me more, if there is more to tell.”

There was not much, except to show the letter dictated by Charlie and written by The Boy. This, with the lock of hair and the knife and jews-harp Fan had purposely brought with her, meaning to tell the story to Carl just as she had told it. The writing was a scrawl, for the hand which wrote it was throbbing with pain, but Carl identified it as Paul’s by the capitals and the formation of some of the letters. The hair and jews-harp and knife he remembered perfectly, and cried again as he held them in his hand.

“If I had been beaten in his place, as I ought to have been he might not have run away, but I was a coward and a sneak,” he said referring to a theft of cake which had been charged to Paul and not denied because he wished to shield his cousin.

The memory of this seemed to hurt Carl the most, and he went over the incident again and again, ending always with the cry, “If I could only take it back.” Then he told us briefly what there was to tell of Paul, whose last name was also Haverleigh, as their fathers had been brothers. Both Paul’s parents had died when he was young, and he had been, in a way, adopted by his Aunt Martha, who was very fond of him until the birth of Carl, when there came a change.

“I suppose my being her own naturally made a difference,” Carl said, “and I know now there was a difference, although mother might not have intended any. I was a spoiled child, and Paul was a lively, wide-awake boy, who, with nothing bad about him, was constantly getting me and himself into scrapes, which mother, with her strict notions, thought awful. Sometimes we were sent to bed or set on hard chairs until they must have ached; I am sure we did. She never inflicted corporal punishment upon Paul but once, and that was about the cake which she thought he stole and lied about. So she thrashed him, and he was nearly as old as I am now. ‘Too big to be licked,’ he said, and ran away. Where he went at first I do not know, and shall never know now, but after the war broke out we traced him, or thought we did, to the army as a drummer boy. Then mother went to Europe for two years, leaving me at school. When she came home she did try to find him and was almost sure he was at Fredericksburg, and that is all. Does mother know?” he asked, and Fan replied, “I have told her the story just as I told it to you. She could draw her own conclusions.”

For a moment Carl was silent, and then he asked, “Did she give no sign that she understood?”

“She cried and has put flowers on his grave every Sunday since,” was Fan’s answer, and Carl continued: “Yes, she knows, and she is sorry,—more sorry than you think. Mother is a good woman, who means to do right, but, unfortunately, her ideas run in a groove too narrow and deep for her to get them out easily. She is Puritanical all through,—great, great, great and double great something of Miles Standish and the Mayflower. I don’t care a fig for either, but I love my mother, and I want you to love her, too. It will be better all round. She is quick to reciprocate, and isn’t a bad sort by a long shot,—a little stiff, that’s all; and if she didn’t own up about Paul, it was a kind of pride which kept her silent. If you told the Aunt Martha part with half the vim you told it to me, she could have no doubt of your opinion of her, and it required a good deal of pluck for her to say ‘I am that woman.’ But she will do it. She’ll tell me Paul is here, and she’ll tell you that she is Aunt Martha, and propose a big monument for Paul and Charlie.”

“No, no,” Fan interposed. “We knew your cousin as The Boy, and as such he must remain. We can have no tall monument here.”

On our return to the house we found Mrs. Hathern sitting on the piazza. Katy, to whom she had been teaching her duty towards her neighbor, had fallen asleep with her head on her stepmother’s lap, while Mrs. Hathern’s hand was lying lightly on the child’s yellow curls. It was a very pretty picture of domestic happiness, and I began to think that, as Carl had said, his mother was not a bad sort after all. There was an anxious, worried look on her face as we came up the steps, on which we all sat down, as the day was very hot.

“Carl,” she began, with a lump in her throat, “you have been to Paul’s grave and have heard how kindly he was cared for by Fanny and Annie?”

Carl nodded, and she went on: “It was a shock to me to know that he was here. You told your sisters, I hope, how we tried to trace him?”

“Yes, I told them everything,” Carl answered, and she continued: “I am glad you did. I couldn’t tell them when I first knew about it. I simply couldn’t, and I waited for you to come. I would give a great deal to have Paul back alive, but as that cannot be, I am glad to know where he is lying; and if you think best we will have him removed to our family lot in Mt. Auburn.”

“Never, no, never,” and Fan sprang to her feet. “He is our Boy. He died with us; we buried him; we loved him. He was ours, and we must keep him here with Charlie.”

“You shall, if you feel like that,” Mrs. Hathern said, “and both Carl and I are more thankful than we can express for the kindness he received from you all. I told your father while you were at his grave, and it affected him greatly. It is strange that our families should be thus brought together, and I hope that the memory of Paul may be a bond of sympathy and kindly feeling between us.”

She held out her hand first to Fanny and then to me, and as we took it we felt that there had already commenced a better understanding between us than had existed before.

“I told you she would face the music, and for her she did it handsomely,” Carl said, when we were alone with him. “She knows she was to blame, and if I were you, I wouldn’t nag her about him any more.”

This he said to Fan, who only answered with a flash of her black eyes. But we understood what he meant, and Paul was never mentioned by us in her presence unless she spoke of him first, which she seldom did. A monument, which should have both his and Charlie’s name upon it, was suggested by her and vetoed by us all. He came to us as the Boy; he died the Boy, and the Boy he must always be to us, a sacred memory, which united the Hatherns and Haverleighs more closely and proved a bond of sympathy and friendship between us and our stepmother.

Looking back through a vista of years and turning some blotted pages of Carl’s life, when temptation got the better of him, I cannot recall a pleasanter summer than that which he spent with us at the Elms. He was so bright and suggestive and thoughtful for every one, and so anxious to please and make the best of everything that he carried sunshine wherever he went. It was a rare gift he possessed of winning all hearts to him, and Fan and I learned more than one lesson of forbearance and toleration from him, although we laughed at him as a prig and should have called him a dude, had the word then been invented.

With the townspeople he was very popular, especially with the young girls, who seemed suddenly to have grown very fond of Fan and myself, and who came to our house at all hours of the day. We had not supposed that Mrs. Hathern cared much for young people, but she was very gracious to Carl’s friends. She gave us teas on the lawn and lunches on the piazza, and played for us to dance in the drawing room and planned excursions for us so that the summer was one long holiday, with Carl as the central figure.

It was September when he left us for Andover, and there were nearly as many people at the station to see him off as there used to be when our soldiers left us for the war. Naturally, after so much pleasant intercourse we expected a great deal of pleasure from his letters. But here we were disappointed. He wrote to us often at first, telling us of his life at Andover, but evincing little interest in the people of Lovering, who remembered him so kindly and spoke of him so often. Then his letters grew shorter and less frequent, and when Fan berated him for it, he gave as an excuse that he was very busy with his studies, trying to fit himself to enter Harvard the next year.

“But whether I write often, or not at all, you may be sure that you are always in my mind and that I love you dearly,” he wrote, and signed himself, “Your loving brother, Carl.”

“Nonsense,” Fan said. “It is a clear case of ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ He was pleased with us when here, but now we are like names written on the sands of the sea which the first wave washes away. Carl is nice, but fickle.”

Chapter XVI.—Annie’s Story Continued.
LITTLE PAUL.

The autumn following Carl’s visit to us passed with little to break the monotony of our lives. Miss Errington wrote occasionally, full of solicitude with regard to Katy’s music, which was progressing so rapidly as to astonish both Fan and myself, and even Mrs. Hathern, who was a thorough and exacting teacher. Jack wrote often and Fan answered when she felt like it. She had not yet made up her mind to be the wife of a poor man, and until she did she could not encourage Jack in his foolishness. Col. Errington did not write again and his proposal of marriage remained unanswered.

“I am very well as I am, and quite chummy with Mrs. Hathern, who has really contributed a great deal to our bodily comfort. I do not want a change as much as I did, and as long as I have two strings to my bow and can choose either at any moment, I am content,” she said, and took the good the gods had provided and laughed over Jack’s love-letters, which were becoming importunate and impatient as he longed for something to work for and hope for and keep his courage up.

As for the household, it moved on with a regularity which no one but Mrs. Hathern could have achieved.

One or two jars there were when Phyllis’s turban was frightfully awry and Norah’s shoes could be heard all over the house; but, for the most part, they were on amicable terms and both united in their antipathy to Julina, who was growing more airy and important every day, and more disinclined to believe in that portion of the catechism which bade her to be content with the condition of life to which it had pleased God to call her. “Who would ever get on in the world if they followed that injunction?” she said, and what was our democratic government good for if it didn’t give everyone an equal chance to rise if he had the brain and will to do so? And she meant to rise. She had once had her fortune told by a clairvoyant in Boston who predicted that she would some day be a great lady, with money and influence at her command. This she communicated confidentially to Fan and me as the secret of her ambition and belief in the future. And at last there came a rift in the clouds,—an opening through which she caught a glimpse of the future she felt so sure of. Her father died suddenly, and the letter which brought the news enclosed one from an aunt in France inviting Julina, who was her namesake, to visit her for as long a time as she chose to stay. Here was her opportunity, and she took it and left us at once, so full of her aunt’s chateau, which, she said, was not far from Fontainebleau, that she came near forgetting to mourn for her father, who had never been much to her.

Two or three weeks later Carl wrote that he had seen her in Boston and that she was to sail for Havre in a few days. Afterwards he sent us a list of passengers on a French steamer, and among them was the name Mademoiselle Julina Smythe, who for years passed completely out of our knowledge and then reappeared in a most unexpected manner.

Christmas came and went, and the winter glided into spring and spring into the first days of June, when the world,—or, at least, that part which Lovering represented,—was full of the beauty and brightness and fragrance of early summer. Never before had our grounds and garden been as lovely and attractive as they were now. Money and taste can do almost everything, and Mrs. Hathern had both, and had expended them freely upon The Elms, which she meant to make the show place in the county. It was exceedingly pretty now, with its grassy lawn, its urns and baskets of various designs and sizes, its rustic chairs and stands for books or work or tea, and its garden full of flowers. After all, it was not a bad thing that father did when he married Mrs. Haverleigh, who had brought us so much luxury and to whom we were getting quite reconciled. She had been so much softer and more companionable since Carl’s visit and our talk with her of The Boy that I began to like her; while Fan, who was slow to change her mind, admitted that things might be worse, and if——. There is nearly always an “if” in every cup of happiness, and ours was so unlooked-for and seemed so undesirable that for a time we refused to accept it as dutiful daughters ought to have done. But there was no alternative; we could not run away, for there was no place to run to, and after a while we made up our minds to submit as gracefully as we could to the inevitable.

In due time a trained nurse arrived from Boston, and a few days later father went in and out of his bed-chamber with an anxious look and frequent demands on Phyllis, who, in her excitement, forgot to put on her turban and seemed like one distraught as she hovered between the kitchen and the sick-room; while Fan and I, with Katy between us, sat under an elm in the farthest part of the grounds and waited, wondering what Carl would say when he heard the news. Norah brought us our lunch, which we ate on the little willow table where we had often had our tea. Her face was cloudy and her shoes creaked even on the grass, showing us her opinion of the matter. I remember so well every incident of that long day,—the glints of sunshine through the trees, the scent of the flowers, the blue of the sky, the twitter and almost human talk of two robins teaching their young ones to fly, and, at last, as the evening wore on and we heard the town clock strike two, Phyllis coming to us across the lawn, her face all aglow with the news she had to tell.

“You’ve done got a little brudder,” she said, “an’ oh! my Lord, he’s dat small. I reckon he could wear one of Miss Katy’s doll dresses. Will you come to the house and I’ll fotch him to you?”

“No, thank you,” Fan said, with a disdainful toss of her head. “I am in no hurry to see my little brother.”

What Fan did, I generally did, and against my better judgment I, too, sat still, but asked, “How is Mrs. Hathern?”

“Mighty bad, I s’pecs, by the way old Mas’r looks and that Boston nuss. She hasn’t seen her baby at all an’ she’s as white as a piece of paper, and keeps moanin’ like.”

“Do you think she will die?” Fan asked, with a ring in her voice which reminded me of the days when we were watching by The Boy.

“Oh, de good Lord forbid!” was Phyllis’s ejaculation. “What could we do with a new bawn baby and the mother dead?”

What, indeed, and why was he sent to us, we asked ourselves, as we sat watching Phyllis going swiftly across the lawn with Katy in advance. Katy was happy, and her first exclamation as she sped away from us was, “Oh, I am so glad, and can I see him now?”

I don’t know how long Fan and I sat discussing the situation, she threatening to answer Col. Errington’s letter and I proposing to make the best of what could not be helped. Perhaps it was an hour, perhaps it was more, when Phyllis appeared again, holding her apron to her eyes with one hand and beckoning us wildly with the other.

“Mrs. Hathern is done took wus, and has as’t for you,” she said.

In an instant we were on our feet, flying towards the house, Fan, as usual, outstripping me and thinking with remorse of the bitter things she had said of the innocent baby, whose plaintive wail we heard as we entered the hall. In every woman’s heart, be she ever so bad and hard, there is a motherly instinct which, under certain conditions, will assert itself. We were neither very hard nor very bad. We were only rebelling as grown-up daughters sometimes do against the introduction in their midst of a baby, and especially when that baby is the offspring of a stepmother. We had not wanted the stepmother, and we didn’t want the baby; but when its faint cry came to us Fan clutched my arm and whispered, “Oh, Ann, hear the poor little thing. I hope its mother won’t die.”

It seemed to me very probable that she would, when I entered her room and saw her lying there so motionless upon her pillows, with every particle of her bright color gone from her face, which looked pinched and haggard and old for a woman of only forty. She had never seemed more than thirty-five. Her eyes were closed and we might have thought her asleep, but for a fluttering of the lids and a movement of her hand as the rustle of our dresses broke the stillness of the room. Katy, who had been fondling the baby, which a negro woman was caring for in an adjoining room, had joined us, and when she saw the white face so changed from what it had been the previous night, when it looked the picture of health, she ran up to father, who was sitting at the side of the bed, and cried out, “Oh, papa, what is it? What makes her look so? Is she very sick?”

A warning sh—— came from the nurse, who was moistening the patient’s lips with some stimulant; but at the sound of Katy’s voice, Mrs. Hathern moved slightly and opened the great black eyes of which we had stood so much in awe. There was nothing to fear from them now, and it seemed to me there was in them a look of wonderful tenderness and love as they rested upon the little girl who was bending close to her.

“Katy,” she said, putting her hand upon the curly head which nestled down beside her as Katy asked again, “Are you very sick, mamma, and do you know about the baby? We’ve got one in the other room. Old Chloe brought him this morning, with a heap of clothes. I’m so glad.”

A faint smile showed around Mrs. Hathern’s mouth and her hand pressed more heavily upon the golden curls.

“Yes, Katy,” she said, very low as if talking were an effort, “I know about the baby, and I want you to love him and care for him if I should go away. Will you, Katy?”

Just so, ten years before, Katy’s mother, in that very room, had spoken to Fan and me, and the scene came back to us so vividly,—the young mother dying and commending to us the little life which had just begun and had since grown to be a part of our whole being. Now it was another mother, and Katy to whom the charge was given, and for a moment I think we both felt chagrined that we should be forgotten; but only for a moment. Turning her eyes towards us, they shone with a strange light of satisfaction as she said, in detached sentences, “Fanny and Annie, I am glad you have come. I want to tell you it was my way that was in fault, not my heart, and I am sorry for all that has gone wrong. You like Carl; try and like my little baby. I know he is not welcome, and when I am gone he may be still less so; he is not to blame. Perhaps God will take him with me; if not, be kind to him, for his father’s sake, and—” She stopped a few moments as if tired out and then resumed, as her eyes wandered around the room, “Where is Fanny?”

“Here I am,” Fan answered, sitting down upon the edge of the bed and taking in hers the cold, clammy hand which was moving restlessly. “Here I am; do you want to tell me something?”

“Yes. About the little baby. Would you object to calling him Paul Haverleigh, after The Boy?”

“No, no; I’d like it,” Fan answered with a choking voice, for, with that subtle intuition which we cannot define, she felt the dark shadow stealing into the room and settling upon the features of our stepmother.

“In my wish to do right, I went wrong with Paul. I know it now, and am sorry. I shall tell him when I see him, and tell him of you. Keep Carl straight. He has fine instincts, but is easily influenced and may be led astray if the temptation comes in pleasant guise. If he falls it will be a woman who lures him on. Keep him as much as possible under your influence and Annie’s. I wish I might see him again, but—” Here her mind began to wander. “It’s getting late. Katy ought to go to bed. Good-night, Katy. I have loved you more than you know.”

She lifted herself up and kissed the bright face bent down to hers, and then lay back upon her pillow as if utterly exhausted.

“Must I go to bed before the sun is down?” Katy whispered to her father, who shook his head and held her closely to him.

It was hours yet before the sun would set, and as they dragged slowly on we watched the dying woman who talked of many things strange to us. Of her first husband and her early home in Maine, and the school-house under the hill with the girls and boys she had known and played with there. They were old men and women now, she said, and their faces were tired and worn as if life had been hard to bear, and she had so much wanted to help them in some way. Then she spoke of Paul and we learned more of him from her ravings than we had known before, and saw more of the motives and principles which had actuated her conduct. Neither were bad, but strict almost to severity. Then she talked of Carl and Katy and father and ourselves, who, she said, did not understand her, but she never mentioned the little baby so soon to be left motherless. He had come into her life so recently and his coming had brought her so low that she seemed to have forgotten him entirely. She grew very quiet at last and fell asleep, while Fan, who always rose to the occasion, took her post at the bedside, bidding the nurse take the rest she needed so much. It was not a long vigil we kept, for as the sun was setting Mrs. Hathern awoke and began to move her hands over the bedclothes as if in quest of something.

“Where is it? Do you know?” she said to Fan, who, divining her meaning, went to the next room where the baby was sleeping in Phyllis’s lap.

Fan had not seen it yet and she scarcely glanced at it now, but she lifted it very carefully in her arms and brought it to its mother.

“Look,” she said. “It’s the baby.”

Very curiously the sick woman looked first at Fan and then at the child, but the mist of death had gathered too thickly on her brain for her to realize the truth. The baby was a puzzle she could not solve.

“Whose is it? Yours?” she asked, putting her hand upon its head.

“No,” Fan answered very gently. “It is your baby,—little Paul. Don’t you remember?”

There was a struggle between reason and delirium, but the soul was drifting away too far for any real consciousness or memory. Only the name of Paul arrested and held it for a moment.

“Little Paul,” she whispered, with a smile. “Yes, he was a pretty boy when I took him; bigger than this one. Whose did you say it is? And who are you?”

Her hand still lay on the baby’s head, but her eyes were closed. She was going fast and Fan knew it, and in an ecstasy of grief and terror held the baby face close to the white lips and said, “Mother, mother, it is your baby. Kiss him once, that I may tell him. It is little Paul.”

She had never before called Mrs. Hathern mother, and now it came from her involuntarily, born of her pity for the dying woman and helpless child. But it produced a wonderful effect. Quickly the eyes unclosed and were illumined with a strange light as they beamed upon Fan.

“You called me mother,” she said, “and it brings things back to me and makes me glad. Thank you, Fanny. Hold the baby nearer while I kiss him for the first and last time. Little Paul, my little Paul.”

She put her arms around the boy, kissed him twice and never spoke again, although she lived until the early dawn of the next day, and then died as peacefully as if going to sleep.

It was I who went with father on the long, sad journey to Mt. Auburn, where the costly monuments and signs of grandeur everywhere were in striking contrast to the simple cemetery on the hillside where she had expressed a wish not to be buried; but when the ceremony of interment was over and we turned away, leaving our dead there alone, I felt that when my time should come I should far rather lie down under the whispering pines, within sight of the lights of home, than be left in that “beautiful city of the dead.” The family monument was tall and grand, and beside the husband’s name was that of “Paul Haverleigh, who died in Lovering, Va., March, 1863, aged 18 years.” I did not know before that it was there, and when I saw it I was conscious of an added feeling of respect and regret for the woman whose real worth I had, perhaps, not fully appreciated.

Carl had met us in Albany, so stunned by the shock of his mother’s death that he scarcely spoke at all, and never asked a question until after the burial and I was alone with him at the Revere, where we stopped, as his mother’s house was rented. I do not think he had shed a tear, but his face was very pale and there were dark circles under his eyes as he sat down by me and said: “Now, Annie, tell me about it. Why did mother die? What was the matter?”

I looked at him in some surprise and asked, “Do you really know nothing?”

“Nothing,” he answered, “except the telegram saying she was dead. I supposed her perfectly well. She wrote to me last week as usual. It must have been terribly sudden.”

“It was sudden,” I said. “It was almost like well to-day and dead to-morrow.”

“But what was it?” he asked, a little impatiently, and I replied, “Carl, don’t you know there is a little baby at The Elms, your brother and mine, who cost your mother her life?”

“A baby? Your brother and mine? It is not true,” he exclaimed, springing to his feet and staring at me as if in some way I were to blame.

“It is true,” I said. “There is a baby at The Elms, born a few hours before your mother died, and Fan is caring for it. That’s why she didn’t come. She held it for your mother to kiss before she died. ‘My little Paul,’ she called it, and those were the last words she ever spoke. ‘My little Paul.’”

Whether it was the memory of the Paul whose grave was under the Virginia pines, or the thought of his dying mother kissing her little boy, or both, I cannot tell; but something unlocked the flood-gates of Carl’s tears, and laying his head on my shoulder he sobbed bitterly, while I tried to comfort him.

“Don’t, Annie,” he said, “don’t speak to me; don’t try to stop me. I must cry. I am so glad to cry. I couldn’t at first for the something that choked me so, when I heard mother was dead.”

He grew calm at last, and began to talk naturally, inquiring after Fan and Katy, and Norah and Phyllis, but saying nothing of the baby. Nor during the few days we stayed in Boston did he ever speak of it of his own accord. He evinced, however, a good deal of interest in, as well as knowledge of, business matters, which were necessarily discussed by my father. By the conditions of the Haverleigh will Carl was now sole heir of his father’s fortune, which was larger than we had supposed. Knowing that he had inherited her love for luxury and expenditure, his mother had purposely kept from him the exact amount of his father’s estate, which, now that he knew it, filled his mind more than the very small amount which little Paul was to have by will from his mother. From the income of her husband’s money Mrs. Hathern had only saved a few thousands, which were hers to do with as she pleased, and these, by a will made a few weeks before her death, she had left equally to my father and their child, should he live; so, while Carl counted his money by hundreds of thousands, little Paul had scarcely three. My father had the same and all the furniture which had been taken to The Elms. I do not think the discrepancy between his fortune and that of his brother occurred to Carl.

The baby was something wholly unexpected and whose existence he could not realize. The money was his father’s, not little Paul’s, and he accepted it as a matter of course, assuming, as it seemed to me, a slight air of importance as the heir to so much wealth. He was very kind to us, and very generous during our stay in Boston, paying all our bills and insisting upon taking us everywhere, or, rather, taking me. Father had no heart to go, but I was young, and the sights of Boston were new and wonderful, and I went wherever Carl took me. Sometimes he spoke of his mother and always with great affection, but he never mentioned Paul until the day we left when he brought me a silver rattle, which he said was for “the little shaver,” who, he presumed, would be a lot of bother to us.

“Indeed, he will not,” I answered, rather hotly, for I was irritated by his indifference. “He is a dear little thing, and so you will think when you come to us in July.”

“I don’t believe I shall come,” he said, hesitatingly, and without looking directly at me.

“Not come!” I repeated. “Oh, Carl, we have anticipated your visit so much that you must not disappoint us. Your mother wanted us to see a great deal of you, and Fan and I will do all we can to make you happy. You said you liked Virginia and us.”

“So I do,” he answered. “I like you immensely, but you see mother’s not being there will make it so sad, and then a lot of the boys are going to camp out in the Adirondacks and want me to go with them. It will not take all summer, though, and, perhaps, I’ll run down for a week or two at the last; so don’t look so gloomy, sister mine. I do love you and Fan and Katy dearly, and I did have a grand time at The Elms; but you see mother is gone, and I like change and new faces,—a new one for every day of the year, if I could have it. Bad in me, I know; but I was born that way, and can’t help it.”

He didn’t seem quite like the Carl of the previous year. He was older,—more mature, more like a young man of twenty-one than a boy of seventeen. But he kissed me very affectionately at parting, and sent his love, with a shell comb, to Fanny, a doll for Katy, a red silk handkerchief for a turban for Phyllis, and a new gown to Norah.

These, with the silver rattle, I brought to our home, which seemed very desolate without the ruling spirit which had kept us at so high pressure that, although we had not at first liked it, we missed it, now it was gone, more than we had thought possible.

“I really don’t know when to go to bed, or get up, or what I ought to do when I am up,” Fan said, with a half sob as we talked matters over the night after my return.

She had dismissed the nurse as too expensive an article to keep. She knew that the money which had been spent so lavishly for us all must cease with Mrs. Hathern’s death, and when I told her what had been left to father, she said, “For his sake I wish it might have been more; he is growing old and his practice is nothing. For ourselves I don’t care. We learned a good many useful lessons from Mrs. Hathern, and I hope we shall not fall back into our old slipshod ways. We have certainly gained something by her coming here,—orderly habits, and our baby.”

There was a world of tenderness in her voice as she said “our baby” and bent over the cradle where he was sleeping. He was so small that I was half afraid to touch him lest he should break in my hands like some brittle toy; but Fan took to him naturally, constituting herself his nurse and exulting over every sign of growing intellect or physical strength as if she had been his mother. What Carl would think of him was a question we often asked ourselves as we counted the weeks he was to spend in the Adirondacks, and then began to look for his coming. But we looked in vain. Following the Adirondacks was an excursion to the White Mountains, which lasted so long that at its close only a few days remained in which to visit us before returning to Andover, and he hardly thought it would pay to take the long journey for so short a time. He wrote to us often long chatty letters full of affection and promises to spend the whole of the next long vacation with us. But the long vacation came and went and was succeeded by another and another, and still Carl did not come.