"It shure was foolish of me to say one word," he admitted with a laugh. "But I tell you girls what I'll do if you back Mis' Plunkett into that plum pretty garment with its white tags. I'll go over to Boliver and bring you both two pounds of mixed peppermint and choco
late candy with a ribbon tied around both boxes, and maybe some pretty strings of beads, too. Is it a bargain?" And Rose Mary smiled appreciatively as Louisa Helen gave an eager assent.
At this juncture a team driven down the Road had stopped in front of the store, and from under the wide straw hat young Bob Nickols' eager eyes lighted on Louisa Helen's white sunbonnet which was being flirted partly in and partly out of the milk-house door. As he threw down the reins he gave a low, sweet quail whistle, and Louisa Helen's response was given in one liquid note of accord.
"Lands alive, it woulder been drinking harm tea to try to whistle a woman down in my day, but now they come a-running," remarked Mr. Crabtree to Rose Mary, as he prepared to take his departure in the wake of the pink petticoats that had hurried across the street.
Then for another hour Rose Mary worked alone in the milk-house, humming a happy little
tune to herself as she pounded and patted and moulded away. Every now and then she would glance down Providence Road toward Boliver, far away around the bend, and when at last she saw old Gray and her rider turn behind the hill she began to straighten things preparatory to a return to the Briars. In the world-old drama of creation which is being ever enacted anew in the heart of a woman, it is well that the order of evolution is reversed and only after the bringing together and marshaling of forces unsuspected even by herself comes the command for light on the darkness of the situation. Rose Mary was as yet in the dusk of the night which waited for the voice of God on the waters, and there was yet to come the dawn of her first day.
And in the semi-mist of the dream she finally ascended the hill toward the Briars with a bucket in one hand and a sunbonnet swinging in the other. But coming down the trail she met one of the little tragedies of life in the per
son of Stonewall Jackson, who was dragging dejectedly across the yard from the direction of the back door with Mrs. Sniffer and all five little dogs trailing in his wake. And as if in sympathy with his mood, the frisky little puppies were waddling along decorously while Sniffer poked her nose affectionately into the little brown hand which was hanging without its usual jaunty swing. Rose Mary took in the situation at a glance and sank down under one of the tall lilac bushes and looked up with adoring eyes as Stonie came and took a spread-legged stand before her.
"What's the matter, honey-sweet?" she asked quickly.
"Rose Mamie, it's a lie that I don't know whether I told or not. It's so curious that I don't hardly think God knows what I did," and the General's face was set and white with his distress.