Here the thrifty Peters family had lived for ten years throughout the winters, removing each spring to the lonely saw-mill in the mountains, where by hard, unremitting toil they succeeded in earning enough money to send their children to good schools in the cold weather. Already Peters was making his arrangements to remove to the woods in April, when his good wife was stricken with a heavy cold that laid her low during the last three weeks of March; though her sturdy constitution triumphed then, and she sat up the first day of April, a little pale and wasted, but, as she expressed it, "feeling just as stout as ever, but glad to have mammy there awhile yet to take the heft of the work off her tired shoulders." In her secret heart black mammy felt cruelly hurt at having come down, in her old age, to work for ordinary "po' w'ite trash;" but she had fallen on evil days in this latter end of her pilgrimage. After the terrible misfortune that had befallen Love Ellsworth, his heartless step-mother had made full use of her power to oppress all who had taken the part of poor Dainty Chase. For many years mammy, with her son and her daughter-in-law, had inhabited rent free, their cabin on the Ellsworth estate, Love also allowing them the use of a patch of ground for their garden. The negroes having belonged to his ancestors in slavery times, he felt that this kindness was but their honest due. But no sooner had Mrs. Ellsworth usurped the reins of government than she proceeded to drive away the poor negroes from the cabin. Thereupon mammy's son and his wife removed to the coal mines of Fayette County, and left the old woman to shift for herself. Though she did her work faithfully for Mrs. Peters, she did not fail to impress on the good woman the superiority of the position from which she had fallen, and the grandeur of the family that had formerly owned her, always adding that "Massa Love wouldn't a let her kem to sech a pass ef he had kep' his mind." Mrs. Peters, with the kindest heart and warmest sympathies in the world, listened patiently to black mammy's tales, till the loquacious old negress at last confided to her the whole story of her young master's blighted love dream, down to the moment when Franklin had brought Dainty Chase to the station, bought her ticket, and sent her on to her mother in Richmond. Then the interested Mrs. Peters also had a story to tell, for she had recognized in the heroine of the story the lovely patient she had tended so faithfully, last fall, at the logging camp in the woods. "And I believe she told the truth to that wicked woman, that she was secretly married to Mr. Ellsworth," she affirmed. "For, Virginny, I'll tell you a secret that hain't never passed my lips before, not even to Peters, and I don't often keep secrets from my good old man. But this is it: I more nor suspected that that pore young chile was in a way to become a mother."