An hour or two later, when the afternoon sunshine was shut out by the green blinds, and the room was filled with a gentle droning sound from the humming-birds at the jessamine, she drew up the small wicker tea table to my bedside, and we made the party with merriment. Her eyes were tired, the three fine nervous wrinkles had deepened between her arched eyebrows, and the soft redness I had objected to, covered her hands; yet that spirit of gaiety, which had seemed to me to resemble the spirit of the bird singing in the old grey house, still showed in her voice and her smile. As she brewed the tea in the little brown tea-pot and poured it into the delicate cups, with the faded pattern of moss rosebuds around the brim, I wondered, half in a dream, from what inexhaustible source she drew this courage which faced life, not with endurance, but with blitheness. Were the ghosts of the dead Blands and Fairfaxes from whom she had sprung fighting over again their ancient battles in their descendant? "This is a nice party, isn't it?" she asked, when she had brought the hot buttered toast from the kitchen and cut it into very small slices on my plate; "the tea smells deliciously. I paid a dollar and a quarter for a pound of it this morning." "If I'm ever rich again you shall pay a million and a quarter, if you want to." The charming archness awoke in her eyes, while she looked at me over the brim of the cup. "Isn't this just as nice as being rich, Ben?" she asked; "I am really, you know, a far better cook than Aunt Mehitable." "All the same I'd rather live on bread and water than have you do it," I answered. She lifted her hand, pushing the heavy hair from her forehead, and my gaze fell on the jagged scar on her wrist. Then, as she caught my glance, her arm dropped suddenly under the table, and she pulled her loose muslin sleeve into place. "Does the burn hurt you, Sally?" "Not now--it is quite healed. At first it smarted a little." "Darling, how did you do it?" "I've forgotten. On the stove, I think." I fell back on the pillow, too faint, in spite of the tea I had taken, to follow a thought in which there was so sharp and so incessant a pang. Before my eyes the little table, with its white cloth and its fragile china service, decorated with moss rosebuds, appeared to dissolve into some painful dream distance, in which the sound of the humming-birds at the jessamine grew gradually louder.