clipped bare of bloom. Many were the dead hands that had been laid in
the earth clasping her lilies. This thought had been for years the chief
solace in her life, and she was accustomed to refer to it in the heat
of religious debates, as though it offered infallible proof of her
contention. After calla lilies, fuchias and tuberoses did best in her
hands, and she had nursed rare night blooming cereus for seven years
in the hope that it would arrive at perfection the following June. Her
marriage had been a disappointment to her, for her husband, a pleasant,
good-looking fellow, had turned out an idler; her children, with the
exception of Archie, the youngest, had never filled the vacancy in her
life; but in her devotion to flowers there was something of the ecstasy
and all of the self-abandonment she had missed in her human relations.

As he sat down at the table, the miller nodded carelessly to his
brothers, who, having finished their bacon and cornbread, were waiting
patiently until the buckwheat cakes should be ready. The coloured
servant was never allowed to cook because, as Sarah said, "she could not
abide niggers' ways," and Blossom, standing before the stove, with her
apron held up to shield her face, was turning the deliciously browning
cakes with a tin cake lifter.

"Ain't they done yet, daughter?" asked Abner in his amiable drawling
voice. He was a silent, brooding man, heavily built, with a coarse
reddish beard, stained with tobacco juice, which hung over his chest.
Since the death of his wife, Blossom's mother, some fifteen years
before, he had become more gloomy, more silent, more obstinately
unapproachable. He was one who appeared to dwell always in the shadow of
a great grief, and this made him generally respected by his neighbours
though he was seldom sought. People said of him that he was "a solid
man and trustworthy," but they kept out of his way unless there was road