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