"Oh, it doesn't make any difference what you once were," Mary said, earnestly. "It is what you are now that counts. I understand you better than I did at first. I see why you are living as you are, away from kindred and friends, and I am glad you told me. It is a great thing to trample an old weakness underfoot and rise up on it. Oh, do you know, what you say makes me hope that my brothers, too, may change! Oh, they must, they must! They cannot go on as they are." Nothing more was said till they reached the cotton-field, which was a level fertile tract of land containing about ten acres. Beyond it lay another tract about the same size, which was planted in corn, while another smaller field adjoining was given over to wheat. Under a tree at the side of the path lay some hoes, and Mary took one and gave him another. "See, this is all you have to do," she began, lightly, going to the first cotton-plant in the nearest row and cutting the weeds about it with the hoe. "You can 'kill two birds with one stone'--loosen up the earth's surface and destroy the weeds at the same time. I'm sure you don't have to be shown which is the cotton." "Oh no! I see that plainly," and with the other hoe Charles set in on the next row, and side by side they worked forward. "Splendid! splendid!" Mary cried, pausing and smiling at him from her sweet, flushed face. "Surely you have used a hoe before this." "Only once, in a little garden at a summer resort," he said. "Then it was cabbages and beans." "But you really are beating me!" she cried, "and it is better done. See! I've left some and you haven't. Your row is as clean as a barn floor before a dance, and your stroke is deep and firm." They worked to the ends of the two rows and were about to start back when an iron bell on a post at the kitchen door rang. They saw Zilla with her hand on its rope, staring at them fixedly. "That is for us," Mary explained. "Dinner is ready, and Aunt Zilla has a fit when anybody's late. We all try to obey that bell. It was put there long before the war. It was used--you see it is a large one--to call up the slaves. My grandfather had a regular code of signals which he used to communicate with his overseer. In that day there were negro uprisings, slave runaways to be stopped, and all sorts of outlandish things that are now out of date. Girls like me, for instance, never worked in the field those days, but it is better this way. I know I am stronger and more healthy than my mother was, and if I had less to worry about I think I should be happier, for my mother was not a happy woman. I am afraid that she and my father were not as well mated as they ought to have been. I think the match was made by the parents on both sides, a sort of marriage of convenience to tie some property together."