For days Sammy had been in a very ill-promising mood; but he brightened as
the foster-parents drove away in the bleak, gray, hostile forenoon, Huldy
helping Aunt Cornelia to dress and make ready, tucking her lovingly into
the wagon and beneath the thick old quilt.

The elder woman yearned over the girl with a mother's compassionate
tenderness. Both Aunt Cornelia and Pap John looked with a passionate,
delighted anticipation to when they would have their own child's baby upon
their hearth. It was the more notable marks of this tenderness, of this
joyous anticipation, which Sammy had begun to resent--the gifts and the
labors showered upon the young wife in relation to her coming importance,
which he had barely come short of refusing and repelling. "Whose wife is
she, I'd like to know? Looks like I cain't do nothin' for my own
woman--a-givin' an' a-givin' to Huldy, like she was some po' white trash,
some beggar!" But he had only "sulled," as his mother called it, never
quite able to reach the point he desired of actually flinging the care, the
gifts, and the loving labors back in the foster-parents' faces.

Pappy Blackshears passed away quietly in the evening; and when he had been
made ready for his grave by Cornelia's hands, her anxiety for the little
daughter at home would not let her remain longer.

"I'm jest 'bleeged to go to Huldy," she explained to the relatives and
neighbors gathered at the old Blackshears place. "I p'intedly dassent to
leave her over one night--and not a soul with her but Sammy, and he nothin'
but a chile--and not a neighbor within a mild of our place--and sech a
night! Pap and me we'll hitch up an' mak' 'as'e back to Huldy. We'll be
here to the funeral a Sunday--but I dassent to stay away from Huldy nair
another hour now." And so, at ten o'clock that bitter night, Pap and Aunt