neck under the close-pinned kerchief, and guessed the guilty secret of hidden finery which it held, and which gave the lie to the profes- sion of a renounced vanity which her garb suggested. If any one was responsible for Dolly Payne's lapse from the severe simplicity of the sect of Friends in after years, it must have been the worldly-minded grandmother who, in this early time, supplied the bits of jewelry worn thus under the rose of Dolly's blushes. The sins of vanity and secretiveness met with the retribution which such wickedness merited, and on one of these fine summer days, after a woodland wandering, the chain and bag and finery were all missing, and the guilty little heart was ready to burst with grief over the loss of its treasures. There was one person at least to whom the culprit could carry the story of her affliction, -- one with ear always open and heart always full of sympathy for the child who, as a baby, had been laid in her arms and hushed on her faithful black breast. This was "Mother Amy," a typical southern "mammy," whose turbaned head had nodded many a night from dusk till dawn over little Dolly's cradle while her soft negro-voice crooned lullabies. But that was in the days of Dolly's babyhood; years before she grew into a school-girl, indif- -2- |