"It’s all up with me!" she groaned, as she sank heavily into a chair in front of the cheerful fire Virginia had in readiness, and pushed her worn shoes out to the flames. "I went from one old friend to another, telling them my condition, but they seemed actually afraid of me, treating me almost like a stranger. They all told tales of need, although they seemed to have plenty of everything. Judge Crane met me in Main Street and told me I could appeal to the county fund and get on the pauper list, but without offering to help me; he said he knew I’d almost rather die than fall so low. No, I’ll not do that, Virginia. That’s what would tickle Ann Boyd and some others powerfully." With lagging steps and a heart like lead, Virginia went about preparing the simple meal. Her mother ate only hot buttered toast with boiled milk on it to soften it for her toothless gums, but the fair cook scarcely touched food at all. Her mother’s grewsome affliction was in the sensitive girl’s mind all through each successive day, and even at night her sleep was broken by intermittent dreams of this or that opportunity to raise the coveted money. Sometimes it was the jovial face of a crude, penniless neighbor who laughed carelessly as he handed her a cumbersome roll of bank-bills; again she would find a great heap of gold glittering in the sun, only to wake with her delicate fingers tightly clasped on nothing at all—to wake that she might lie and listen to Jane’s sighs and moans as the old woman crouched over the ash-buried coals to light a tallow-dip to look, for the thousandth time, at the angry threat of fate upon her withered breast. To-night, greatly wearied by her long ride and being on her feet so long, Jane went to bed early, and, when she was alone, Virginia, with a mental depression that had become almost physical pain, went out and sat on the front door-step in the moonlight. That very day a plan of her own in regard to the raising of the money had fallen to earth. She had heard of the munificent gift Luke King had made to his mother, and she determined that she would go to him, lay the case before him, and pledge herself to toil for him in any capacity till he was repaid; but when she had gone as far in the direction of the newly purchased farm as the Hincock Spring, she met Mary Bruce in a new dress and hat, and indirectly discovered that King had given up his last dollar of ready money to secure the property for his people. No, she would not take her own filial troubles to a young man who was so nobly battling with his own. At any other moment she might have had time to admire King’s sacrifice, but her mind was too full of her own depressing problem to give thought to that of another. Her sharp reproof to him for his neglect of his mother during his absence in the West flitted through her memory, and at a less troubled moment she would have seen how ridiculously unjust her childish words must have sounded.