[Illustration: "FOREVER TURNING BACK TO KISS HIM, WITH HER HANDS FULL OF FLOWERS, AND WITH THE PEACOCKS TRAILING BESIDE"] "Oh!" ejaculated Hope Carolina; and, reaching the fence with a rush, she stared down lovingly. For they were peaches, real, live, human peaches--the kind that you buy for five cents apiece, which was a great price in the hired house. The form outside the fence straightened up then, and two oldish gray eyes looked over it into hers--the Radical Judge's eyes. "No more stones, please," they seemed to say, with a trace of embarrassment at being caught. Hope Carolina nodded back with a lovely courtesy, as if to say in return: "Sholy not." For this was no moment for politics. Besides, something in the watching eyes--a wistful something which spoke louder than words--had awakened all the lady in her; and there was more of it, I can tell you, than you may be inclined to believe. Silently, with eyes still meeting eyes, they stood there for a moment; the great Radical almost shrinkingly, the fiery little Democrat with a new, sweet feeling which made her seem, for the instant, the bigger, stronger one of the two. Then, still silent, he was gone; and snatching the peaches with another ecstatic "Oh!" Hope Carolina did the thing she had dumbly promised. She kicked down the stone fort. After she was in bed, she explained the deed to herself; for there, with reflection, had come some of the pangs that must pierce the breast of the traitor in any decent camp. You can't take peaches and throw stones too, no, not even if Democrats would almost want to hang you for not doing it! She had come to the pits by now, and these, after more rapturous suckings, she put under her pillow for planting; for when you are six you plant everything. She did not know that another and more wonderful seed had already put forth a green shoot in her own so piteously hardened little heart. Hope Carolina slept in a marvelous bed, almost the only thing of value, in fact, left in the hired house. Ma would not use it herself, she told dear friends, because of its memories; but as the child of the house had no recollections of other times, it seemed to her always a downy and restful nest. There were carved pineapples at the top of the high mahogany posts, and four more at the bottom of them; and when Hope Carolina lay in it in the morning, she could see everything that was going on in the Radical Judge's garden--that lovely paradise of peacocks and poplars and magnolias which had once been the dear Prestons'.