Mrs. Bruce went out, so that her son might go to sleep, but he slept very little. All night, at intervals, the buzz of low voices and sudden outbursts of merriment reached him and found soothing lodgment in his satisfied soul. Then, too, he was revelling in the memory of Virginia Hemingway’s eyes and voice, and a dazzling hope that his meeting with her had inspired. His mother stole softly into his room towards the break of day. This time it was to bring an old shawl, full of holes and worn to shreds, which she cautiously spread over him, for the mountain air had grown cool. She thought him asleep, but as she was turning away he caught her hand and drew her down and kissed her. "Why, Luke!" she exclaimed; "don’t be foolish! What’s got in you? I—" But her voice had grown husky, and her words died away in an irrepressible sob. She did not stir for an instant, then she put her arms round his neck and kissed him. XVII It was in the latter part of August. Breezes with just a touch of autumnal crispness bore down from the mountain-sides, clipping from their stems the first dead and dying leaves, and swept on across Ann Boyd’s level cotton-fields, where she was at work at the head of a score of cotton-pickers—negro men, boys, women, and girls. There were certain social reasons why the unemployed poor white females would not labor under this strange woman, though they needed her ready money as badly as the blacks, and that, too, was a constant thorn in the flesh of Ann’s pride. She could afford to pay well for work, inasmuch as her planting and harvesting were invariably profitable. She had good agricultural judgment, and she used it. Even her cotton picking would average up better to the acre than any other farmer’s, for she saw to it that her workers put in good time and left no white, fluttering scrap on stalk, leaf, or bole to attract the birds looking for linings for their winter’s nests. When her black band had left a portion of her field, it was as if a forest fire had swept over it, leaving it brown and bare. The negroes were always ready to work for her, for the best of them were never criticised for having done so. The most fault-finding of her enemies had even been glad of the opportunity to call attention to the fact that only negroes would sink so low as to toil by her side. But the blacks didn’t care, and in their taciturn fidelity they never said aught against her. As a rule, the colored people had contempt for the "pore white trash," and reverenced the ex-slave-holder and his family; but Ann Boyd was neither one nor the other. She was rich, and therefore powerful—a creature to be measured by no existing standards. When they worked for their old owners and others of the same impoverished class, they were asked to take in payment old clothing, meat—and not the choicest—from the smoke-house, and grain from the barn, or a questionable order to some store-keeper who, being dubious about the