A shade of regret saddened her face for an instant.
"But a body has always got somethin' to be glad over," she mused: "there's havin' them, such pleasant company, here tonight, and Pa and Nancy so agreeable, and—and Mr. Lindsay a comin' to stay with us a Saturday."
The sudden warmth that came into her heart brought a faint heat to her cheeks. She remembered something Mr. Lindsay had said to her when he sat beside her in her buggy on the way to Callie Brock's burial, in the last month of the summer. On that occasion, he had no way to go and some one had pointed out to him a vacant seat in Miss Lucy's buggy.
It was something about the loneliness of a man with no home ties, and the look that accompanied the words was responsible, though Miss Lucy did not realize it herself, for the various soft-hued and pretty "remnants" she had bought and made into waists for everyday wear for herself,—waists Miss Nancy supposed were long since sold to the negroes in Plumville, to whose trade Miss Lucy catered. In reality they were locked in Miss Lucy's trunk, away from chance of Miss Nancy's revilement of their colors and rebukement of her for extravagance. Miss Nancy herself wore prints, patched, and faded to a nondescript brown, for everyday.
Miss Lucy went to the end window of her room and looked wistfully out on the coal-shed with its meager pile.
"I wish," she said to herself, "considerin' we ain't got no wood hardly on the place, Nancy and Pa'd agreed to get a little more coal, so's we could have bigger fires when we are all a settin' around when the work's done up, and could set up later of nights."
CHAPTER III
At the Stripping-House
"It is easy to tell the toiler
How best he can carry his pack:
But no one can rate a burden's weight
Until it has been on his back."