And yet Mrs. Frank Tracy, who stood on the wide piazza, looking after a carriage which was moving down the avenue which led through the park to the highway, did not seem as happy as the mistress of that house ought to have been, standing there in the clear, crisp morning, with a silken wrapper trailing behind her, a coquettish French cap on her head, and costly jewels on her short, fat hands, which once were not as white and soft as they were now.  For Mrs. Frank Tracy, as Dorothy Smith, had known what hard labor and poverty meant, and slights, too, because of the poverty and labor.  Her mother was a widow, sickly and lame, and Dorothy in her girlhood had worked in the cotton mills at Langley, and bound shoes for the firm of Newell & Brothers, and had taught a district school, ‘by way of elevating herself,’ but the elevation did not pay, and she went back to the mills in the day-time and her shoes at night, and rebelled at the fate which had made her so poor and seemed likely to keep her so.

But there was something better in store for her than binding shoes, or even teaching a district school, and, from the time when young Frank Tracy came to Langley as clerk in the Newell firm, Dorothy’s life was changed and her star began to rise.  They both sang in the choir, standing side by side, and sometimes using the same book, and once or twice their hands met as both tried to turn the leaves together.  Dorothy’s were red and rough, and not nearly as delicate as those of Frank, who had been in a store all his life:  and still there was a magnetism in their touch which sent a thrill through the young man’s veins, and made him for the first time look critically at his companion.

She was very pretty, he thought, with bright black eyes, a healthful bloom, and a smile and blush which went straight to his heart and made him her slave at once.  In three months’ time they were married and commenced housekeeping in a very unostentatious way, for Frank had nothing but his salary to depend upon.  But he was well connected, and boasted some blue blood, which, in Dorothy’s estimation, made amends for lack of money.  The Tracys of Boston were his distant relatives, and he had a rich bachelor uncle who spent his winters in New Orleans and his summers in Shannondale, at Tracy Park, on which he had lavished fabulous sums of money.  From this uncle Frank had expectations, though naturally the greater part of his fortune would go to his god-son and name-sake, Arthur Tracy, who was Frank’s elder brother, and as unlike him as one brother could well be unlike another.