Thus at her ease on this point, she grew more talkative, half wishing that her dress was not a shilling-calico, or her hair combed back quite so straight, giving her that severe look which Morris had said was unbecoming. It was very smooth and glossy, and Sybil Grandon would have given her best diamond to have had in her own natural right the heavy coil of hair bound so many times around the back of Helen’s head, and ornamented with neither ribbon, comb, nor bow. Only a single geranium leaf, with a white and scarlet blossom, was fastened just below the ear, and on the side where Mark could see it best, admiring its effect and forgetting the arrangement of the hair in his admiration of the well-shaped head, bending so industriously over the work which Helen had resumed—not crocheting, nor yet embroidery, but the very homely work of darning Uncle Ephraim’s socks, a task which Helen always did, and on that particular night. Helen knew it was not delicate employment, and there was a moment’s hesitancy as she wondered what Mark would think—then, with a grim delight in letting him see that she did not care, she resumed her darning-needle, and as a kind of penance for the flash of pride in which she had indulged, selected from the basket the very coarsest, ugliest sock she could find, stretching out the huge fracture at the heel to its utmost extent, and attacking it with a right good will, while Mark, with a comical look on his face, sat watching her. She knew he was looking at her, and her cheeks were growing very red, while her hatred of him was increasing, when he said, abruptly: “You follow my mother’s custom, I see. She used to mend my socks on Tuesday nights.” “Your mother mend socks!” and Helen started so suddenly as to run the point of her darning-needle a long way into her thumb, the wound bringing a stream of blood which she tried to wipe away with her handkerchief. “Bind it tightly round. Let me show you, please,” Mark said, and ere she was aware of what she was doing, Helen was quietly permitting the young man to wind her handkerchief around her thumb which he held in his hand, pressing it until the blood ceased flowing, and the sharp pain had abated. Perhaps Mark Ray liked holding that small, warm hand, even though it were not as white and soft as Juno’s; at all events he did hold it until Helen drew it from him with a quick, sudden motion, telling him it would do very well, and she would not trouble him. Mark did not look as if he had been troubled, but went back to his seat and took up the conversation just where the needle had stopped it. “My mother did not always mend herself, but she caused it to be done, and sometimes helped. I remember she used to say a woman should know how to do everything pertaining to a household, and she carried out her theory in the education of my sister.”