“Has she eyes like stars, lips like cherries, neck like a swan, and a laugh like a ripple of music?” Pearl asked eagerly.

“Them’s it,” Tom replied modestly.

“Then I’d go, you bet!” was Pearl’s emphatic reply.  “There’s your mother calling.”

“Yes’m, I’m comin’.  I’ll help you, Tom.  Keep a stout heart and all will be well.”

Pearl knew all about frustrated love.  Ma had read a story once, called “Wedded and Parted, and Wedded Again.”  Cruel and designing parents had parted young Edythe (pronounced Ed’-ith-ee) and Egbert, and Egbert just pined and pined and pined.  How would Mrs. Motherwell like it if poor Tom began to pine and turn from his victuals.  The only thing that saved Egbert from the silent tomb where partings come no more, was the old doctor who used to say, “Keep a stout heart, Egbert, all will be well.”  That’s why she said it to Tom.

Edythe had eyes like stars, mouth like cherries, neck like a swan, and a laugh like a ripple of music, and wasn’t it strange, Nellie Slater had, too?  Pearl knew now why Tom chewed Old Chum tobacco so much.  Men often plunge into dissipation when they are crossed in love, and maybe Tom would go and be a robber or a pirate or something; and then he might kill a man and be led to the scaffold, and he would turn his haggard face to the howling mob, and say, “All that I am my mother made me.”  Say, wouldn’t that make her feel cheap!  Wouldn’t that make a woman feel like thirty cents if anything would.  Here Pearl’s gloomy reflections overcame her and she sobbed aloud.

Mrs. Motherwell looked up apprehensively

“What are you crying for, Pearl?” she asked not unkindly.

Then, oh, how Pearl wanted to point her finger at Mrs. Motherwell, and say with piercing clearness, the way a woman did in the book: 

“I weep not for myself, but for you and for your children.”  But, of course, that would not do, so she said: 

“I ain’t cryin’—­much.”

Pearl was grating horse-radish that afternoon, but the tears she shed were for the parted lovers.  She wondered if they ever met in the moonlight and vowed to be true till the rocks melted in the sun, and all the seas ran dry.  That’s what Egbert had said, and then a rift of cloud passed athwart the moon’s face, and Edythe fainted dead away because it is bad luck to have a cloud go over the moon when people are busy plighting vows, and wasn’t it a good thing that Egbert was there to break her fall?  Pearl could just see poor Nellie Slater standing dry-eyed and pale at the window wondering if Tom could get away from his lynx-eyed parents who dogged his every footstep, and Pearl’s tears flowed afresh.

But Nellie Slater was not standing dry-eyed and pale at the window.

“Did you ask Tom Motherwell?” Fred, her brother, asked, looking up from a list he held in his hand.

“I sent him a note,” Nellie answered, turning around from the baking-board.  “We couldn’t leave Tom out.  Poor boy, he never has any fun, and I do feel sorry for him.”