lives up in the vines under the eaves of my home moaned out and was
answered by one from under the vines that grow over the gables at the
Crittendens'. I haven't felt as lonesome as all that since the first
week of Sam's freshman year at college. As I looked across the lilac
hedge, which was just beginning to show a green sap tint along its gray
branches, I seemed to see my poor little blue-ginghamed, pigtailed self
crouched at Judge Crittenden's feet on the front steps, sobbing my
lonely heart away while he smoked his sorrow down with a long brier
pipe, and the Byrd chirped his little three-year-old protest in concert
with us both. Most eighteen-year-old men would have resented having a
motherless little brother and a long-legged girl neighbor eternally at
their heels, but Sam never had; or, if he did, he gently kicked the Byrd
and me out of the way, and we never knew that was what he was doing. We
even loved him for the kicks. Then as the tears misted across my eyes a
woman with a baby in her arms came out and called in two children who
were playing under the old willow-tree over by the side gate--the willow
that had belonged to Sam and me--and my eyes dried themselves with
indignant astonishment.

"Who are those people over at the Crittendens', mother?" I asked, in a
stern voice, as I walked in and interrupted mother counting the
fifteenth row on a lace mat she was making.

"Why, the Burtons bought the place from Sam after the judge's death.
Don't you remember I wrote you about it, Betty dear?" she answered, with
the gentle placidity with which she has always met all my tragic
moments. Mother raised seven boys before she produced me, and her
capacity for any sort of responsive excitement gave out long before I
needed it. After her sons a woman seems to consider a daughter just a
tame edition of a child. Mother has calmly crocheted herself through