It was Monday, the fifteenth of December. Mrs. McCorkle ushered Ellesworth upstairs into his own room in the cottage mortgaged in his own name. The sun poured into it like a living blessing. The rose-bush enveloped the windows, and when the sash was raised, delicate tendrils insinuated themselves within, as if, in Southern fashion, they would "shake howdy." The room was dainty and home-like. It flashed across Ellesworth as he sank into the cushioned rocking-chair with a long breath of content, that it might have been Georgiella's. It was in the dreamy part of the day. The sun was dipping under the high branches of the pines. Then the luxury of leaning out of the window in December! He could not help but think of it as _his_ sun, and _his_ garden and _his_ trees. And now Georgiella came out, bareheaded, and swept the pine needles and leaves from the narrow box-bordered path, and snipped dead branches from the shrubs, and then before she went to feed the chickens she cast up at him a shy glance that made his heart leap within him. He did not leave his room until he was called to supper. His fancy was feverish, and kept picturing his mortgaged girl in a Boston drawing-room, thrilling all the people he knew with her beauty. He called it carmine beauty; but he was young and ardent. He felt it when he first saw her, but that eventful afternoon he formulated it and repeated it over and over again until he became dizzy--"I love her! I love her!" And then visions of work and strength and success, and ambitions that had been stifled, began to spring within him like blades from watered bulbs. The electric shock had come. He knew it. He meant to spring to it like a man. Dreamily he dressed for supper, and dreamily descended. Mrs. McCorkle greeted him with her fine, thin manner. The young man looked about him curiously. Aunt Betsey waited on the table. He tried not to think of her hospitality in the matter of snuff. The room was worn and bare and gray; so bereft of all but the most necessary furniture that its few ornaments had a startling conspicuousness. He noticed a fat Chinese vase set up like an idol in an old escritoire. Over the mantel was a glass-case religiously protecting some coins and ancient papers. A rusty sword hung on the wall. Biographies of Lee and Jackson, flanking the Chinese fat vase in the dilapidated escritoire, and a villainous crayon framed in immortelles upon the wall, that probably represented his deceased debtor, completed the ornamentation of the room. Miss Benson entered when he had gone as far as this, and vivaciously exhibited the bric-a-brac of the room. "This is a Ming." She pointed to the fat vase. "I understand there isn't another like it in the country. It belongs to the Ming dynasty." Although from Boston, Ellesworth was not familiar with the Ming dynasty, but he bowed and feebly ejaculated,-- "Ah! this is a real Ming, is it?"