Oldfield people were waiting when the mail came; consequently, everybody knew what everybody else received. And then Miss Judy used to give out kind messages to the neighbors from her father's letters; messages which did not sound at all like the major. But Miss Judy was wholly unconscious that her own sweetness colored whatever it may have been that her father had really written. She was as unconscious of this as of any reason that she herself might have had for growing sour, as her lovely youth faded, neglected like the wild flowers blooming unseen in the shadowy woods. The quiet lives of the little sisters thus went on uneventfully from youth to maturity. They were as utterly alone, so far as association with their own class was concerned, as if they had lived on a desert island. Only the occasional letter from their father marked the passing of the years. They were sheltered by the old log house, and they subsisted somehow on what grew from its bit of ground. It was the same now that it had always been; it was still the same, except that the little sisters had passed unawares into middle age, when they heard that their father was dead. No one ever knew whether the daughters were told the whole sad truth: that this gallant old soldier of the Revolution, who had done much for the winning of Independence, had died in prison bounds for debts which he was never able to pay. Miss Judy's beautiful eyes were dim with weeping for a long time. Miss Sophia was sad for many months through sympathy with her sister's grief. Miss Judy took the purple bow off Miss Sophia's cap and a blue one off her own and dyed them black. Their Sunday coats, as they called two thread-bare bombazines, were black already, and their everyday coats had also been black before turning brown. So that those two poor little bits of lutestring ribbon were the only outward signs of new bereavement. II THE OLDFIELD PEOPLE Living was leisurely down in the Pennyroyal Region of those old days. About the middle of the last century, some twenty years after the major's death, the weeks and months and years went by so quietly that his daughters grew old without knowing it. No one indeed ever thought of Miss Judy as old. Charm so purely spiritual as hers has never any age. And then it would seem as if an element of perpetual youth often lingers to the last around a lovable unmarried woman as it rarely does around the married. The rose keeps its beauty and sweetness longest when left to fade ungathered. Possibly Miss Judy may have been a shade slighter than she had been twenty years before, although she was never much stouter than a willow twig. Her hair can hardly have been whiter than it had been ever since anybody could remember, and it was just as curly, too, notwithstanding that she tried harder every day to brush it till it was prim and smooth, as she thought white hair should be.