“Well, I don’t know much about music,” admitted Sylvia.  “I can’t tell if anybody gets off the key.”

“I can,” said Lucinda, firmly.  “She sings enough sight better than I can, but I sang plenty well enough for them, and if I hadn’t been so mad at the way I’ve been treated I’d kept on.  Now they can get on without me.  Lucy Ayres does look miserable.  There’s consumption in her family, too.  Well, it’s good for her lungs to sing, if she don’t overdo it.  Good-bye, Sylvia.”

“Good-bye,” said Sylvia.  She hesitated a moment, then she said:  “Don’t you mind, Lucinda.  Henry and I think just the same of you as we’ve always thought, and there’s a good many besides us.  You haven’t any call to feel bad.”

“I don’t feel bad,” said Lucinda.  “I’ve got spunk enough and grit enough to bear any load that I ’ain’t heaped on my own shoulders, and the Lord knows I ’ain’t heaped this.  Don’t you worry about me, Sylvia.  Good-bye.”

Lucinda went her way.  She held her nice black skirt high, but her plodding feet raised quite a cloud of dust.  Her shoulders were thrown back, her head was very erect, the jetted ornament on her bonnet shone like a warrior’s crest.  She stepped evenly out of sight, as evenly as if she had been a soldier walking in line and saying to himself, “Left, right; left, right.”

Chapter X

When Sylvia reached home she found Rose Fletcher and Horace Allen sitting on the bench under the oak-trees of the grove north of the house.  She marched out there and stood before them, holding her fringed parasol in such a way that it made a concave frame for her stern, elderly face and thin shoulders.  “Rose,” said she, “you had better go into the house and lay down till dinner-time.  You have been walking in the sun, and it is warm, and you look tired.”

She spoke at once affectionately and severely.  It seemed almost inconceivable that this elderly country woman could speak in such wise to the city-bred girl in her fashionable attire, with her air of self-possession.

But the girl looked up at her as if she loved her, and answered, in just the way in which Sylvia liked her to answer, with a sort of pretty, childish petulance, defiant, yet yielding.  “I am not in the least tired,” said she, “and it did not hurt me to walk in the sun, and I like to sit here under the trees.”

Rose was charming that morning.  Her thick, fair hair was rolled back from her temples, which had at once something noble and childlike about them.  Her face was as clear as a cameo.  She was dressed in mourning for her aunt, but her black robe was thin and the fine curves of her shoulders and arms were revealed, and the black lace of her wide hat threw her fairness into relief like a setting of onyx.