moment, then rose agitatedly and moved to a pew across the aisle.

Blanche Devine's face went a dull red beneath her white powder.
She never came again--though we saw the minister visit her once
or twice. She always accompanied him to the door pleasantly,
holding it well open until he was down the little flight of steps
and on the sidewalk. The minister's wife did not call.

She rose early, like the rest of us; and as summer came on we
used to see her moving about in her little garden patch in the
dewy, golden morning. She wore absurd pale-blue negligees that
made her stout figure loom immense against the greenery of garden
and apple tree. The neighborhood women viewed these negligees
with Puritan disapproval as they smoothed down their own prim,
starched gingham skirts. They said it was disgusting --and
perhaps it was; but the habit of years is not easily overcome.
Blanche Devine--snipping her sweet peas, peering anxiously at the
Virginia creeper that clung with such fragile fingers to the
trellis, watering the flower baskets that hung from her
porch--was blissfully unconscious of the disapproving eyes. I
wish one of us had just stopped to call good morning to her over
the fence, and to say in our neighborly, small-town way: "My,
ain't this a scorcher! So early too! It'll be fierce by noon!"

But we did not.

I think perhaps the evenings must have been the loneliest for
her. The summer evenings in our little town are filled with
intimate, human, neighborly sounds. After the heat of the day it
is pleasant to relax in the cool comfort of the front porch, with