"I 'ain't got no place in partic'lar to go. Anyway, I knew your ma wasn't goin' to be in, and--" "I bet you played on the piano," Frederica said, smiling at herself in the glass. "Well, yes'm, I did," the woman confessed. "I picked out the whole of 'Rock of Ages.'" "Flora! Don't look so low-spirited; I believe you're in love. Have you got a new beau? I've been told that people are always low-spirited when they're in love." Flora simpered; "Ah, now, Miss Freddy!" "Come! Who is he? You've got to tell me!" "Well, Mr. Baker's got a new man on. That there snide Arnold's been bounced. Good riddance! He never did 'mount to nothing. Me, I'm sorry for the girl he married; she'll just slave and git no wages. That's what marryin' Arnold'll do for her!" "That's what marrying any man does for a woman," Miss Payton instructed her; "a wife is a slave." But Flora's face had softened into abject sentimentality. "This here new man, Sam, _he's_ something like. Light, he is; and freckled." Then her face fell: "Anne says he's got a girl on the Hill. Don't make no difference to me, anyhow. It's music I want. If I was young, I'd git an education, and go to one of them conservmatories and learn to play on the piano." "I'll give you some lessons, one of these days," Fred promised her, good-naturedly. "Poor old Flora," she said to herself, as the maid, like a fragile brown shadow, slipped out of the room. "'He's got a girl on the Hill'! I wonder how I'd feel if Howard had 'a girl on the Hill'?" Again the tremor ran through her; she could not have said whether it was pain or bliss. "I certainly must teach Flora her notes," she said, trying to get back to the commonplace. Then she forgot Flora, and, bending forward, looked at herself in the glass for a long moment. "I'll get that hat at Louise's," she said, turning out the gas; "it's the smartest thing I've struck in many moons." CHAPTER VIII